Anti-Utopia
The Joker.
by Jean Malaquais.
Doubleday. 319 pp. $3.95.
In more than a generation of nightmare novels, there have developed two main versions of the anti-utopia—that dream of a future state administered for the greatest ill of the greatest number. The one sort, represented by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, concentrates on the coming superstate itself, and its characters are mainly designed to illustrate the mechanics of a society built from a coherent—and implicitly vicious—political theory. In the dream world of Franz Kafka, on the other hand, the horror of the future merges with that of the present, and the protagonist is trapped in a poisonous smog rather than seized by the tentacles of a political octopus.
Somewhere between these two versions comes “the City” of Jean Malaquais’ new novel The Joker. The inhabitants live in massive compounds of “four to five thousand apartments” spied on by “inspectors” who enforce the City’s principle that one exists for the sake of “being one with the City.” The police official’s declaration that “Being is exactly what you call being no one” is paraphrased by the hero into “I crawl, therefore I am.” Despite the paraphernalia of the anti-utopian superstate, however, Malaquais avoids both the logic and realism of detail that make Brave New World and 1984 so terrifying. Instead, he tries to imitate the atmosphere of Kafka by consistent “unrealism,” or what one might call “logical illogicality.” As in Kafka, the characters of The Joker appear and disappear with supernatural vagueness. Telephones ring inside bureau drawers and vanish shortly afterwards. A girl finds her father seized and her apartment ransacked by the police, who have left a giant metronome ticking insanely in one room and a Van Gogh hanging upside down in another.
Through the center of all this wanders the hero, the joker, Pierre Javelin, who makes a mistake in signing a document and finds that the police are after him for impersonation. His wife disappears, his job is taken away, his documents are unacceptable, he is losing his identity. This, it becomes apparent, is the center of Malaquais’ concept of the anti-utopia. The target of his attack is conformism, the mindless, spineless anonymity already obvious in the contemporary world. This is scarcely a profound idea, however, and Malaquais moreover fails to analyze or describe it in any great detail. Instead of going beyond or even equaling Huxley—whose target was much the same—Malaquais falters at every climactic point into the subterfuge of creating “atmosphere” for its own sake.
Javelin finds his name blacklisted everywhere, but he temporarily overcomes this confusion by turning it into chaos: since he is hunted for impersonating himself, he takes identity papers from a girl and registers himself under her name. At every turn, Javelin is confronted by Dr. Babitch, the omniscient police official, waiting behind doors, demanding a confession, proving to Javelin that he does not exist because he is not “one with the City.” All this is in the best tradition of the genre, and yet it makes less of an impression than many contemporary phenomena. A perceptive description of Grand Central Station or the Pentagon could be more frightening than anything in The Joker.
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The “individualism” of Malaquais’ hero, which is supposed to leave the superstate tottering, is little more than a slightly imbecilic jauntiness. Poetry—Javelin drops his forbidden verses in random mailboxes—and sex provide the joker with what is described as the last laugh on the secret police. Typical of his “individualism” is a scene when Javelin feels hot and uncomfortable during a questioning by Dr. Babitch; he goes into the bathroom, sticks his head in the toilet and flushes it. “You consider yourself witty, whereas you are merely lugubrious,” Dr. Babitch says, a remark that hits the book as well as the hero. We are told, finally, that the inspectors have somehow overlooked a hotel maid who has been sporadically nursing the hero into pneumatic bliss and will presumably enable him to retain his identity. This is Javelin’s triumph, but one’s sympathies tend to slip over to the side of the secret police.
In his murky atmosphere, hints of symbolism, and surrealistic narrative, Malaquais constantly reminds one of Kafka, but Malaquais is weakest just where Kafka is strongest—in the quality of his experience of the nightmare. Kafka’s “unreality” is genuine and as real as Orwell’s realism. With The Joker, one simply feels that a writer decided to dramatize his rather meager ideas about identity and individualism; it is all a working out and working up of something, a figure of speech and not the real thing, a joke that doesn’t come off.
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