BOO KS
129
most recently,
Porte devergondJe,
do, however, appear consciously of–
fered to the delectation of a happy few: the pose of the narrator
is
that
of an esoteric anthropologist and
collectionneur,
the discoverer and
prestidigitator of strange and marvelous psychic rituals. Mandiargues
is in fact both an amateur anthropologist and an intensely intelligent
tourist; his fictions typically take their departure from a "curiosity"
discovered, then evolve toward a rigidly ordered delirium evoked with
a remarkable sensuous concretion. The delirium, like the curiosity, is
usually of erotic provenance: at the center of Mandiargues' world is
sensuality in its most self-conscious, sumptuous, self-reflexive fonn. For
the inhabitants of this world, eroticism is the ritual of pleasure and
liberation, the cultivation and celebration of an individual's vitality.
Mandiargues' earliest literary allegiance was to Surrealism, and the
atmosphere of his stories evidently owes something to Breton, Souppault
and Aragon, as well as to Mandiargues' favorite painter, Chirico.
But not only does he possess to a supreme degree the power to transfonn
reality into an hallucination where the fearful and disgusting are
sensuously fused with the beautiful, he is a baroque craftsman who,
unlike the Surrealists, is not reticent to demonstrate his precise intel–
lectual control of his material. His style is elegant, even
precieux,
and
the urbane, intelligent, witty voice which dominates his tales determines
that our posture as readers shall be a worldly curiosity embracing both
terror and humor. Mandiargues evidently relishes
a
certain deceptive
quality inherent to most of his tales, their tendency finally to vaporize
in an uncertain world where it is difficult to distinguish the banal
from the extraordinary; the narrative presence reasserts itself,
to
leave
us with the voice of the collector, the slightly eccentric aristocrat.
While
The Motorcycle,
unlike Mandiargues' other fiction, must
be counted a novel by virtue of its effort to trace an individual's destiny,
as well as its length, it is tacitly posited on the author's recognition that
he is not really engaged with this destiny, that the individuality of his
character really doesn't matter. His heroine is called Rebecca Nul,
as
if to emphasize her subjection to the erotic ceremony which, variously
recalled and rehearsed, lies at the center of the novel: her submission
to her lover, Daniel Lionart (who, one must note, constitutes the most
serious failure of the book: a sort of anodyne, playboy Sade, a pallid
development of some of the delightful libertines of the stories), from
whom she received, the day of her marriage
to
the schoolteacher
Raymond Nul, a huge black Harley-Davidson designed to carry her to
their trysts. The texture of the novel is created from such a trip, and
at the center of the book, the motorcycle is intensely alive. Alive as a
