580
PARTISAN REVIEW
knowingly or unknowingly, has been written
as
the preparation for a
masterpiece.
It
is
questionable whether the genius of Marcel Ayme can show it–
self immediately and fully in anyone book. Perhaps the best one can
do is to recommend the reading of several of his novels and stories con–
secutively, for to take anyone of them in isolation is to risk the im–
pression that Ayme is merely a comedian, or merely a satirist, or merely
a misanthropic, amusing observer of human vanity and folly. But
with whatever book one begins, the reading of
The Miraculous Barber
certainly ought not to be neglected for very long.
If
we take this novel
as the satire of a given time and place, the subject is the France of the
Popular Front, and resembles in the most literal sense New Deal
America. In his genre pictures of over-eager liberals, in whom knowledge
becomes a form of stupidity, and overcomplicated primitives, whose
very naivete is the royal road to swindle and treachery, Ayme illuminates
not only an era
in
France, but the same period in America, and yet also
human nature in any time and place. Moreover, as a social observer he
goes beyond politics not by ignoring it, but by exhausting its human
possibilities, by showing how much of experience overflows and bursts
through political categories or any other conceptual framework.
Aymes
comedy is terrifying in
its
ease, its impact, and its implica–
tions. It is as if he were able to don in quick succession the masks of
Kafka, Buster Keaton, Swift, Chaplin, and Gogol- metaphysical fantasy,
dead-pan and frozen-face hysterical calm, catastrophic exaggeration
or disastrous understatement, precarious and pathetic shabby gentility in
aspiration and flight, or hallucinatory description and invention-he
commands all of these comic methods, and no matter how extreme his
caricature is, he never loses hold of actuality: the reader never forgets
that he is reading a real story about real human beings in a real world.
If
it is convenient to reduce Aymes essential powers to a single formu–
lation, one might say that he has found the ways in which an absolute
cynicism about human beings can lead to a profound love of human
beings; and a mature, awakened, conscious acceptance of human na–
ture on the heights and in the depths. What other author has made
cynicism a route to love?
If
there are others, it is doubtful that they
also possess Aymes compassion, his imaginative sympathy, his joyousness,
and above all his unsurpassed mastery of sheer narrative, a mastery
which holds all other elements in place. In most satirists, the energy of
satire leads to fantasy and nightmare distant from reality or a cartoon
