Made Of Clay - 'The Procedure' - Review

Commonweal, Oct 12, 2001 by Charles Murtaugh

The Procedure
Harry Mulisch
Translated by Paul Vincent
Viking, $24.95, 230 pp.

A current exhibit at New York's Museum of Natural History depicts the 3 billion letters of the human genome as filling 140 Manhattan telephone books. In The Procedure, Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch more provocatively describes the genome as "five hundred bibles...by which you are completely determined." In a previous novel, The Discovery of Heaven, Mulisch compared the universe as divine creation to the written word as human; here, he extends the analogy to the genetic code, a script written within our very cells. As his author-narrator tells us at the outset, "[God's] creation, too--the world, man--is linguistic in nature, ultimately a question of spelling, just like the world and the people that I in turn wish to conjure up." While textbook writers conceptualize genes as words, Mulisch's protagonist, the brooding molecular biologist Victor Werker, prefers to imagine the genetic code as Word. Victor has actually written a new code, and infused life into a clay crystal--thus pulling off an imitatio dei even more audacious than that of the novelist.

Mulisch's ideas are provocative, his narrative frequently brilliant, and his timing--amid news reports on cloning and genetically modified organisms--impeccable. All the more frustrating, then, that his novel fails to live up to the promise of its dazzling opening chapters, in which the narrator lays out the themes of the story to come. Among these is collaboration: unlike God, who could breathe life into the earth without assistance, human creations require "that there should be two...[which] suits us well because there are two of us too, you and I"--that is, writer and reader. The novel disappoints because its ideas overwhelm its narrative action; where idea and action try to collaborate, the result is often lifeless.

This is exemplified in thirty-four pages that Mulisch uses to retell the legend of the Prague golem, created in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Jehudah Low. The parallels between Low and his rabbinical son-in-law bringing a clay man to life, and the later story of Victor and his colleague Brock animating their own clay, are potent yet obvious, so obvious that Mulisch could have dramatically condensed what amounts to novelistic stock footage (the Jewish ghetto is rendered in smoky alleyways, rag shops, and onions--lots of onions) and elaborate, static set pieces. For instance, when Low is summoned to an audience with the Emperor, he (and the reader) first must sit through a banquet table debate about the relationship between sign and signified, conducted by an intellectual Who's Who of the Holy Roman Empire. Amid Mulisch's name-dropping, one hears a lingering echo of "lights, camera, action."

The Prague section follows a fascinating introduction by the novel's narrator, and is succeeded by a lively account of Victor's parents, a military officer and a sculptor (her profession is one of the novel's subtler bits of symbolism). One encounters this chapter as if emerging from a stuffy subway station. Mulisch shows off a gift for invigoratingly specific details when, for instance, Victor's parents shake hands over the name of their unborn child: "Because for a couple of weeks she'd been too tired to work in her studio, for the first time since he'd known her, her hands were completely clean."

Most of the slim novel is taken up with a series of letters sent by Victor to his estranged lover Clara, addressed to their stillborn daughter Aurora. His hubristic success in artificial creation stands in stark contrast to his failure at the more usual method. These letters alternate between sparklingly erudite ideas and utterly unlikely events, staged for our benefit. Victor's entire career is a case in point: having created the eobiont, a living clay, he has improbably set this work aside to study the DNA of Egyptian ape mummies. One suspects that he is brought to Egypt less for his research than to allow Mulisch to weave Egyptian mythology into his tapestry of cultural references ("[Apes] were sacred here, because they were dedicated to the writer-god Thoth, who awakened Osiris from death"). These references impress, but the novel creaks under the weight of its allusions.

A further note on Victor's improbable career: when he is not creating life in the lab, or necromancing with mummy DNA, he apparently vivisects chimpanzees. No reason for this odd side-project is given, but it certainly supports Mulisch's indictment of the scientific endeavor. Notwithstanding his suspicions of the modern-day black arts (or perhaps driven by them), Mulisch must have enjoyed his research, because he deploys the arcana of molecular biology with the same aplomb he exhibits in classical mythology and the Kabbalah.

Victor's letters come most fully to life when Mulisch releases his narrative from its thematic strictures. Consider the beautiful, terrifying description of his and Clara's stillborn child: "I went over to her [Clara], knelt down next to the bed, and put a hand on your narrow chest. You were warm! You were dead and yet warm! But it wasn't your warmth, it was Mummy's. From now on you would cool down minute by minute, until you had reached the room temperature of your death." The father's emotions transcended by the scientist's need to observe and hypothesize: this passage is perfect, apart from the unforgivable pun on "mummy."