Volume 19, Number 9 · November 30, 1972
The Cyclopean Eye of the European Phallus
By Karl Miller
G.
by John Berger
Viking, 311 pp., $7.95
The Ogre
by Michel Tournier, translated by Barbara Bray
Doubleday, 373 pp., $7.95
Berger and Tournier have almost as much in common with each other as Webster and Tourneur have, those companions of the Jacobean Literature syllabus. And perhaps they also have something in common with Webster and Tourneur. Both their novels relate historical crises—respectively, the First World War, together with certain disturbances that preceded it, and the Second World War—to legend, and to the activities and fantasies of a heroic individual. Berger would be likely to sympathize with Tournier's reference to 'the stupid massacre of '14-'18'; both try to explain such stupidity. Both novels use the image of a phallic Cyclops, of a penis with an eye in it, both invoke the shade of Don Giovanni, and these and other coincidences of myth and metaphor could suggest that both contain an element of vogue, and that the fashions and forces that shape them are at no great distance from one another. Different as they may now appear, they may eventually be seen to belong to a category no broader than that of the ethos of the Jacobean stage.
Review, 3246 words
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