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Books of The Times
In Chess, Rigid Reason Confronts Fluid Intuition
By WALTER GOODMAN
The championship chess game played out in the course of "The
Tower Struck by Lightning" pits, anarchism against
Marxism, intuition against icy ideology, human vagaries against
scientific fanaticism.
The players in this intriguing novel seem equally matched for
skill and craziness. Marc Amary, the Swiss champion, is a strict
Marxist of Albanian persuasion who leads a terrorist band that
is opposed both to Western capitalism and to Soviet Communism.
He is also a brilliant physicist (author of "Dual Amplitudes
With Coupling of the Omega for Six Pions and Gyrating Bosons."
who believes he is close to finding "the Great Unification,"
a synthesis of scientific knowledge. And if all the forces of
nature can be unified, he reasons, why not politics and life itself
?
As Amary sees the match, "the struggle is revolutionary,
that scientific," and he is opposed "by an enemy relying
on absurd means." His absurdist opponent, Elias Tarsis, is
a Spaniard, a natural chess genius who earns his living as a machine
operator and would probably have taken religious orders had he
not been diverted by sex. As Tarsis sees it, Amary "looks
at the board like a bureaucrat Putting a fiveyear plan into operation."
Since their creator, Fernando Arrabal, is a luminary of the theater
of the absurd, his sympathies are naturally with Tarsis, the man
of intuition who has battled his way through a desire for domination
and a taste for cruelty to achieve love with two compliant women.
Mr. Arrabal will be remembered by chess fans for his quirky role
in "The Great Chess Movie," a documentary made during
the 1981 world championship match between Anatoly Karpov and Viktor
Korchnoi.
As the AmaryTarsis game, being played at the Beaubourg Center
in Paris, proceeds, Mr. Arrabal flashes back to the Grand Guignol
adventures of the antagonists. A rudimentary acquaintance with
chess is enough for the reader to follow the match, since clear
diagrams are provided of each move. Mr. Arrabal's analysis is
original: "The sciatic nerve of the position had been ever
so lightly grazed.," The connections between playing this
game and playing the games of politics, science, religion' and
sex are developed with a freewheeling imagination and a wry intelligence.
The author is not one to strain for a tidy plot. On Tarsis's mind
as he ponders his next move is the recent kidnapping of Igor Isvoschikov,
at 72 the youngest member of the Soviet Politburo. The Spaniard
lays the crime to the Swiss champion. The terrorists are demanding
that Moscow bomb the Saudi Arabian oilfields, a way of clearing
the board for the perfect order envisioned by Amary.
Mr. Arrabal, a daring player himself, darts this way and that
with great aplomb. He juggles political theory, psychological
insights, erotic passages, spy doings, all the while winking at
us and tossing off one-liners.
On politics: He describes a Marxist splinter movement that
" "dreamed of' one day being able to count on a genuine
worker in their ranks" and notes that "all insurgents
have always belonged to the welltodo classes, for they can see
injustice clearly from the best seats in the stands!' He. Tells
of a disconsolate revolutionary who decides "to commit suicide
by masturbation. It was his second attempt. He had developed a
taste for it."
On religion: He observes, "The pious life can count on one
great advantage: it is quite cheap. to lead," and he gives
Spain high marks for being the preeminent manufacturer of hair
shirts. Referring to a period when the Virgin appeared to Spanish
shepherds, he comments, "It's not surprising that she is
seen so seldom now, given the gradual disappearance of that trade."
On nothing in particular: He credits the appeal of Esther Williams
in part to the fact that she was not Tennessee Williams or William
Carlos Williams. As Mr. Arrabal's sympathetic translator, Anthony
Kerrigan observes in a foreword, the author "takes exception
to almost everything."
As the game proceeds, the bizarre lives of the two champions,
who hate each other without, apparently, ever having met before
their big match, are played out in alternating moves. Amary killed
his own mother at the urging of imaginary presences from his childhood
(including a cigar-smoking snake) who constantly kid his pretensions.
"I'm a Marxist, all right," says one of these creatures,
"Groucho tendency, and a Leninist, Lennon tendency."
While the youthful lunacy of Tarsis has been quelled by religious
experience (it was his custom to "hear Mass in the chapel
of the Sanatorium of Tubercular, Scrofulous, and Rachitic Girls,")
the childish demons of the proudly rational Amary gain the ascendancy
until he sees them hopping all over the chess board.
The pace quickens toward the end, with decisive moves in the game
and in the basement where the Soviet diplomat is being kept. "The
Tower Struck by Lightning" (think of Amary as the
tower and Tarsis as the lightning) is a romp by a very shrewd
and talented performer. Standing in' for the author, Tarsis plays
his game: on the assumption that "the most decisive results
come about after much useless planning and that in history, moreover,
the most lofty endeavors may be the result of chance and the most
mediocre causes may provoke the most fabulous effects."
Mr. Arrabal is not making a case that chess is life or that life
is chess only that both, mercifully and mercilessly, are subject
to human inspiration and the accidents of fate.
-----------------------------------------------
The Tower Struck by Lightning
By Fernando Arrabal
Translated from the Spanish by
Anthony Kerrigan. 242 pages.
Viking Press. $16.95.
Jerry Bauer
* * *
The Cosmic Chessboard
THE TOWER STRUCK BY LIGHTNING
By Fernando Arrabal.
Translated by Anthony Kerrigan.
Illustrated 242 pp. New York:
Viking. $16.95.
By Daniel Odier
THE setting is the 25th world chess championship at the Beaubourg
Center in Paris. The adversaries are named Marc Amary and Elias
Tarsis. There is an element of East and West in this; indeed,
Amary and Tarsis are compared with the Soviet chess master Anatoly
Karpov and the American Bobby Fischer. But the dimension here
is cosmic. What if "The Tower Struck by Lightning"
were Karpovfischerian in the highest degree, what if each chess
piece and each square on the board were mingled black and white
in a Taoist way and what if Fernando Arrabal had achieved perfection
through "serenity in disorder," as the great Taoist
Chuangtzu wrote?
This book can be seen as an opera, a film, a philosophical tale,
an adventure novel. At first we might take it to be a novel about
chess and politics, a supremely clever, diabolical, comical and
vitriolic intellectual game until, among the observers of the
game whom Mr. Arrabal refers to without really describing them,
we discover not some crimson Dadaist but the ghost of Jorge Luis
Borges. Which means that this novel is far from a baroque medley.
In a foreword, Anthony Kerrigan, the excellent translator, tells
a story that nicely conjures up Mr. Arrabal, the Spanish playwright,
novelist, artist and film maker. Mr. Kerrigan had hoped to meet
him in Spain, only to discover that Mr. Arrabal had left the country
and the Franco regime would not let him return. But Mr. Kerrigan
did find, plastered on walls in Madrid streets, large posters,
photographs of Mr. Arrabal nude. They displayed a writer whose
stature may be small, but one part of him definitely is not. "This
cartel, this affiche," Mr. Kerrigan says, "was apparently
his most artistic, his most bohemian, reply in the circumstances.
He could thereby cry Presente!, in the Hispanic ritual of both
Left and Right. And: 'The Style is the Man'; and style may be
physiological."
In "The Tower Struck by Lightning" (the
title is taken, of course, from a tarot card), Tarsis and Amary
are inescapably linked to each other not only by the game, which
relegates the world to the state of a fantasy, but also by their
pasts, which intersect between moves on the chessboard. It might
be said, if such divisions were not a little simplistic, that
Tarsis is creativity, intuition, eternity, the right hemisphere
of the brain playing against Amary, who is analysis, science,
time, the left hemisphere.
Tarsis is Spanish and knows that all disorder arises from immanent
order. What is at stake lies more in the way of playing than in
victory, but that does not prevent him from wanting to crush his
opponent's ideology by beating him. At the beginning of the game,
goaded by his certainty that Amary is a murderer, he even wonders
if he should not kill him immediately. Amary is Swiss, a physicist
and a likely candidate for a Nobel Prize. He flees from freedom,
the mother of chaos, by means of "maniacal ceremonies",
"the rites of a castrated eunuch". But he is also working
on the grand unification theory to explain all the forces of the
universe and that may seem paradoxical.
We learn between games that when he was in school Tarsis reduced
a fellow student to slavery and locked him in a toilet where he
inflicted humiliation and torture on him, and that Tarsis "was
overcome with an infinite desire to cry, in the knowledge that
he was alone and abandoned." The victim was expelled from
the school and Tarsis was rewarded by one of the faculty, a priest
who taught him chess.
Amary's childhood was a little different. His insane mother was
confined in a psychiatric clinic. His father, a diplomat, was
always absent. He shared a luxurious apartment with a brother
in Geneva, a place with a "forbidden" bedroom where
secret creatures waited for him: the Kid, Mickey and El Loco,
who reappear later, sweeping the chessboard with a terrible verdict.
After learning of his birth in an Indian outhouse at a time when
his mother's labor pains seized her unexpectedly, he tried to
commit suicide by obesity. He stole, he swallowed his mother's
pearl necklaces, he named himself The Master in passages of a
laconic diary, he got excellent grades in school by inventing
quotations and authors and referring to imaginary scientific theories.
And he conceived the paranoid dream of solving the overall enigma
of the universe. He also killed his mother by infecting her with
lovingly cultivated tetanus germs and justified himself by quoting
Chairman Mao: "Some terror is always necessary."
In the novel the chess players reduce the world's wars to a war
of their own and become indifferent to external combat as the
combatants did in Satyajit Ray's film "The Chess Players"
and as Tolstoy did during the Crimean War when he abandoned his
post for a game of chess, which he won before losing his rank.
Amary is the ultimate revolutionary, and his terrorist dream he
is suspected of having abducted a member of the Soviet Politburo
to demonstrate that revolution could come from parallel Marxisms
makes the world whirl around the motionless chessboard. Tarsis
feels cannibalistic joy when he chews up Amary's chess pieces.
Tarsis is "a rational artist," Amary "an irrational
scientist." Between them is destiny, a key piece in the game
in the person of the scientist Christophe de Kerguelen, Amary's
political comrade but also a jealous colleague who will drastically
affect the Outcome of the combat.
DIAGRAMS of the chessboard are scattered through the book,
enabling us to follow the game. Between moves we witness a mystical
crisis in Tarsis' life. After being a jeweler's apprentice and
then a pimp in Barcelona, "a place where he suffered pleasure,"
he became a faithful servant of the Society of Jesus. That did
not prevent the future Jesuit from dreaming of Esther Williams
and William Carlos Williams cavorting in the same technicolor
blue water. Like Amary torturing the kidnapped Politburo member,
Tarsis became an inquisitor, racking his mistress, Nuria, with
interrogations. After confession, Tarsis was told by his spiritual
father, "You will be a fine Jesuit," maybe even "a
minor saint." Just then, in one of the linkages Mr. Arrabal
is so good at making, Tarsis takes Amary's bishop.
Tarsis fled Barcelona and in Valencia came under the spell of
one Soledad Galdós, a mystical shepherdess who held together
the trio she formed with Tarsis and Nuria, who had followed his
trail to his place of exile. Nuria's breakdown, the love and compassion
of Soledad, the hermaphroditic union of the three characters all
this has magical power.
But chess was invented to settle cosmic disputes. Tarsis and Amary
are indissolubly bound together by a discovery made by Kerguelen.
And the denouement seals that bond.
"The Tower Struck by lightning is cut like
an emerald. Underlying it are an admirably controlled lyricism
and an inventiveness that contrast sharply with the rosy naturalism
creeping into the novel more and more these days.
