Idiocy and Fantasy

No culture has ever stressed individuality as ours does; we dote on our idiosyncrasies. But the historical norm is different; it emphasizes the subordination of the individual to some religious or political group, as now in China and Russia. As usual, the Greeks had a significant word for it: idios means at once "personal," "peculiar," and "separate": anyone separate from the group, the demos of a democracy, is an idiot.

Needless to say, this modern aberration has produced modern literature, which thrives on idiots and personal peculiarities. It has also troubled those writers who - idiots themselves - recognize that as Thomas Mann put it, "In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms." Yeats, for one, reacted with dismay:

How can I, that girl standing there,My attention fixOn Roman or on RussianOr on Spanish politics?

On the one hand, the horrors now inflicted on their citizens by totalitarian regimes are matched in ferocity if not scope by those inflicted by our capitalist states on equally rightminded dissidents: and such horrors cannot be ignored. On the other hand, the goal of political freedom and civilization itself is, in our time, the complex elaboration of the idiotic, apolitical private life. What then is the writer to do?

Julio Cortazar, an expatriate Argentine, has demonstrated his individuality in novels (e.g., Hopscotch) and poems. Now, guilt has led him to write a political novel about South American revolutionaries in Paris, mixing extreme idiosyncrasy with objective news reports of actual atrocities. It punishes those who, like Cortazar himself, cannot cross "the bridge" from the world of the self to that of self-sacrifice and commitment. A badly flawed novel, weakened precisely by its idiosyncrasies, it is also a moving and troubling one that deserves attention from extremists and bridge-standers alike.

Needless to say, it attacks everything that Dartmouth stands for except the Orozco murals, and it is mentioned here only because it is translated by that dazzlingly agile translator Gregory Rabassa.

Rabassa also translated these short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, of which the title story makes a pretty fantasy out of a grandmother's prostituting her granddaughter, a situation that Cortazar would presumably find contemptible; at least his politicized characters would, however Argentine they might be. (Garcia Marquez has written his political novel, TheAutumn of the Patriarch, translated by Rabassa. It is weaker than Cortázar's because more narrowly and simplistically personal. It stresses its dictator's ugliness, for instance, which is as stupid as Jeffrey Hart's syndicated assertion that all dissidents are homely.) These quaint and fantastic stories suggest that Garcia Márquez is a man of one book, the HundredYears of Solitude, and also that Rabassa's remarkable powers are sometimes displayed in inferior works.

A MANUAL FOR MANUELBy Julio CortazarTranslated by Gregory Rabassa '44Pantheon, 1978. 389 pp. $10.95

INNOCENT ERENDIRAand Other StoriesBy Gabriel Garcia MarquezTranslated by Gregory Rabassa '44Harper & Row, 1978. 183 pp. $8.95

A member of the English faculty at the University of Connecticut, Professor O'Hara is asprolific a book reviewer as Professor Rabassa isa translator.