|
COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Once upon a time--in 1971, if you must know--I read a slender book that seemed to me original, droll, and mysteriously precious. Wrapped in a posterish Roy Lichtenstein dust jacket, and set in narrow-measure boldface sans serif, Frederic Tuten's "The Adventures of Mao on the Long March" was a deadpan amalgam of quotation, parody, history, and fanciful fiction whose central image is that of Mao Tse-tung as a keen fan of Godard films and Minimal art, a Pateresque aesthete with a billion people on his hands. In an age when Mao posters adorned college dorms and Donald Barthelme ruled the nouvelle vague of fiction, the book made more sense than you might think; crediting a totalitarian icon with a thoroughly hip American mentality was wishful thinking of a merciful sort during the grim denouement of our intervention in Vietnam. "The Adventures of Mao" had Barthelme's bold surrealism without his personal quality, his short stories' effect of being coded private reports from the front lines of city and, specifically, Village life. With all its bland absurdity, Tuten's book took a lofty tone; it was a collage of his soul's contents, where militant socialism and languid aestheticism coexisted in peaceful stalemate.
When I recently tried to find the volume, in the safe niche within my diffuse and uncatalogued holdings where I imagined I had cached it, it had vanished. Perhaps this is fitting, since after 1971 the author, too, rather vanished. Where has he been? Earning a living, of course, with Guggenheim grants and teaching stints--a number of years in Paris, countless years as director of the Graduate Program in Literature and Creative Writing at City College in New York. A loyal band of fellow-Manhattanites (Susan Sontag, Joseph McElroy,...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
