Books: The Red Whale

BIG MAC (117 pp.)—Erih Kos—Har-courf, Brace & World ($3.50).

Every Yugoslav, save one, feels deep stirrings of patriotism when the Great Whale is caught. And when it is brought to Belgrade for the general astonishment, the whole city, roused by deeper stirrings, turns out to praise its decaying corpse.

Penniless bookkeepers excitedly tally the whale’s earning powers; children marvel at its youth and strength; bureaucrats boast of its bulky contribution to the economy. Barren women, seeing the whale, nudge each other and say: “There’s a man for you!” Only Despic Rade, a civil service clerk, remains apart, at first wishing only to ignore the whale: “What’s the whale to me?” But adoration for Big Mac sweeps up around him everywhere, and his outspoken feelings about whales soon darken.

Worse, whale-worship breeds conspiracies.

“It doesn’t do to go against public opinion,” an old friend whispers in Rade’s ear, warning him that his fellow office workers are about to turn on him. His landlady talks in cipher to his fellow lodger, using “big, strong, black and forceful words, always heavy, coarse, masculine nouns, signifying something huge, strong and powerful, which reminded me of the whale.” In horror he finds whales swimming into his own conversation—”a whale of a time,” “the Prince of Wales.” Martyrdom’s Delusion. In this superb social satire, Erih Kos, himself a Yugoslav bureaucrat, dissects the evils of conformity with a fanciful touch that scarcely disguises the depth of his intent; his message is reminiscent of lonesco’s Rhinoceros—the battle for individuality is worth fighting against any odds. When Big Mac was published in Yugoslavia, orthodox critics and even Kos’s admirers agreed that he had perhaps gone too far. Only the madness that eventually spills Hero Rade into the warm bath of martyrdom’s delusion —the “devoted ecstasy,” Kos calls it—spares Yugoslavian society the full weight of Big Mac’s lesson. If the man apart is slightly mad, society sheds some blame.

Kos, 49, is well known in Yugoslavia for a heroic novel (Tifo) and some short stories. Critics there praise him for his efforts to establish social satire in Yugoslavia (despite the fact that as director of the National Museum he is obliged to take the government seriously). But his grasp of the satiric method is so masterful that he keeps several lines of intent running at once—the narrative, the lesson, the joke—creating an impression of charm, not bitterness, of critical appreciation, not disloyalty. To make a point, he follows Voltaire’s example and speaks in Panglossian didactics: “When we do not want to think of something, it is best to forget it.” Final Kinship. In Big Mac, moreover, Kos’s aim reaches far beyond Yugoslavia’s frontiers. When the whale’s decay at last turns a pinch-nosed public against him, Rade is still despised—he loses mistress, friends, job and wits. Finally, he feels a kinship with the whale. Big Mac is destroyed, and Rade, who can think of society only as pagan, goes to a hilltop and shouts down on Belgrade: “Armageddon! Armageddon! Armageddon!” Big Mac and Rade, Kos says, have shared an “experience of men.” It is an experience, Kos finds, all the more pathetic because it is grand, all the more grave because it is gay.