Roland Topor (1938–1997)

A translation of a French psychological horror novella from the mid-sixties that stays with you.

The story of a troubled man whose insecurity leads to a descending spiral into destructive paranoia. It may be short (at just over 160 pages) but it’s not an easy read. It’s not likable, yet is so well written that you get pulled into the protagonist’s bewildering world where you are never sure what is reality and what is delirium induced.

On the down-side the author does seem somewhat unnecessarily obsessed with bodily functions.… (mer)

review of
Roland Topor's The Tenant
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 15, 2012

The way I remember it is that my 1st encounter w/ Roland Topor's work was in a bk I read in October, 1975, called Bizarre (1965), compiled by Barry Humphries. As I recall, there was a series of Topor cartoons that I hated so much that I actually tore out the pages that they were on b/c I felt like they ruined the bk for me. I still have that copy of Bizarre so I took it off my shelves to consult it for this review &, indeed, pp 47-52 have been torn out. I've never done this w/ any other bk & find the idea of doing so completely against my usual tendencies so this was an extremely strong reaction on my part.

Looking at the table of contents, I see that the title of the section torn out was "Handy Household Hints for the Mutilation of the Mona Lisa". There's no credit given. That causes me to wonder if I misremember Topor's being the creator of these. The title intrigues me somewhat, it seems like something that might've amused me slightly, but I remember the pictures as being so incredibly stupid that I found them intolerable. I shd probably find another copy of this bk w/ these pages still inside so that I can clear up this mystery: why did I hate them so much? Did Topor actually do the drawings? Topor has drawings in the "Love at First Sight" section. Perhaps I confused these w/ the ones torn out. Dunno.

Since then, Topor's work has very peripherally been in my life. He was, eg, in Werner Herzog's film Nosferatu (I have no idea who he was in that), a film that sortof marked the beginning of what I considered to be Herzog's decline. The Tenant was turned into a film by Roman Polanski, a film that I thought was one of Polanski's better ones - but I'll have to qualify that.

Polanski! Polanski's early childhood was tormented by nazi brutality. A Polish Jew, he had the misfortune of having his mother forced to go to the Auschwitz concentration camp where she was promptly murdered. His father was taken away too but survived & he & Polanski were eventually reunited. He was robbed & exploited bv a Roman Catholic family, forced into traveling in the Polish sewers to steal food, beaten, etc.. It's a wonder that he survived - but it's no wonder that so many of his films are so grim. Making matters even more horrific, Polanski's pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was then gruesomely murdered in 1969. Topor, too, was the son of Polish Jews, refugees in Paris from the nazis, who was born in Paris & managed to somehow survive there under nazi occupation. This connection between Topor & Polanski is obvious.

I've seen many Polanski films: "Two Men and a Wardrobe" (an early short), "Knife in the Water" (1962), "Repulsion" (1965), "The Fearless Vampire Killers" (1967) (I think I hated this one so much I never watched the whole thing - again, very unusual for me), "Rosemary's Baby" (1968), "Chinatown" (1974), "The Tenant" (1976), "Pirates" (1986) (another one I didn't bother to witness all the way thru), "Frantic" (1988), "The Ninth Gate" (1999), "The Pianist" (2002). For the most part, I've thought of Polanski as a somewhat mediocre filmmaker - w/ the notable exceptions being the ones that explore the deepest psychic dis-ease: "Repulsion", "Rosemary's Baby", "Chinatown", & "The Tenant".

In Ed Sanders' bk about the Manson Family, wch, oddly, I no longer seem to have, I remember Sanders being deprecating about Polanski saying something to the effect that Polanski had the distinction of having made the most repulsive movie ever, "Repulsion". This seemed bizarrely insensitive of Sanders to me at the time - & still does. According to an online source, "Repulsion", "Rosemary's Baby", & "The Tenant" are loosely referred to as "The Apartment Trilogy". All 3 depict an extreme claustrophobia of psychic terror - the 1st & last being exemplars of paranoid deterioration.

So why do I like Polanski's most depraved films the most & dislike the comedies? "Chinatown" is probably in my top 10 of movies that get to the heart of how the powerful become that way & stay that way. Its basis in the California manipulations of control over water is far more important than I suspect many people wd ever give a 2nd thought too. "Repulsion" is an incredibly convincing depiction of the mental deterioration of the main character - w/o reliance on fancy special effects, the character's state of mind is horrifyingly easy for the witness of this film to sympathetically enter into. Polanski is about as 'masterful' as anyone can get in this area.

Nonetheless, it disturbs me somewhat that the main films of Polanski's that I like are the ones that strike me as the most authentically tortured. & "The Tenant" fits right in. At the same time that I don't necessarily find Topor's writing to be the greatest (at least in translation from the original French), I can say that the overall theme of a man drifting uncontrollably thru various unstable states from daydreaming to fever dreaming to what-apparently-is-never-meant-to-be-clearly-'true'-or-paranoid-or-whatever IS great.

The claustrophobia, the helplessness, the hopelessness of The Tenant is utterly convincing & utterly fatal. What at one level cd be reduced to a parody or a critique of living in an oppressive apartment house, becomes, at another level, a delving into the general precariousness of the human mind. The main character daydreams:

""I'm on horseback, leading ten thousand maddened Zaporozhe Cossacks. For three days now, the frenzied hooves of our horses have thundered across the steppes. Ten thousand enemy horsemen are racing towards us, surging across the horizon with the speed of lightning. We don't turn an inch from our course; the shock of the two hordes, when they come together, can be heard for miles. I am the only one who remains in his saddle. I draw my scimitar and begin carving a path through the masses of men on the ground. I don't even look to see who receives the blows. I just cut and chop away. In a little while, the plain is nothing but a vast expanse of bloody remains. I sink my spurs into my horse's flanks, and he whinnies violently with the pain of it. The wind presses against my head like a tight-fitting helmet. Behind me, I hear the cries of my ten thousand Cossacks . . . No, behind me, I hear . . . No. I'm walking in the streets of a city, at night. The sound of footsteps makes me turn around. I see a woman, trying to escape from a drunken sailor. He snatches at her dress, and it tears away. The woman is half naked. I hurl myself at the brute and knock him to the ground with just the impetus of my charge. He does not get up. The woman comes up to me . . . No, the woman runs off into the darkness . . . No. The Metro at six o'clock in the evening. It's filled to overflowing. At every station, more people try to get into the cars. They push and shove the people who are already inside, supporting themselves against the doors and butting backwards with their rumps. I arrive and give the biggest shove of them all. The whole crowd of people bursts through its walls and falls onto the lines. The train coming in the other direction crushes the screaming mass of travellers. It goes on through the station in the middle of a river of blood . . ."" (p 92)

Note that in each of these fantasies, the character is powerful in different ways & is a survivor, a winner. In his 'actual' life (this concept being rendered effectively dubious here) things are quite different. This, of course, is typical of the way daydreams are generally conceived of but Topor makes esp effective use of it here.

In the brief bio of Topor at the beginning of this bk, he's described as having been "a founder member of 'Groupe Panique' with Fernando Arrabal, Alexandro Jodorowsky and Jacques Sternberg; he was later associated with the artistic movement Fluxus, working closely with such artists as Daniel Spoerri and Robert Filliou" [..] "Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi being a favorite subject. His feature film Marquis, made with Henri Xonneux and based on the life of the Marquis de Sade, was released in 1981." Jodorowski, Spoerri, Filliou, Jarry, & de Sade?! This was a man delving deep. How do humans survive their own horror? & why did I react so violently against (the hypothetical) Topor in 1975?! It's highly significant that Polanski chose to play the main role himself in his film version of The Tenant.… (mer)