This Year's Pundit

By Melvin Maddocks

WITHOUT MARX OR JESUS by Jean-Franc,ois Revel. 269 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

Jean-Franc,ois Revel has been described by Mary McCarthy as having a "bullish" aspect, a "broad-browed, head-lowered promise of some intransigent charge into the arena." With critical hoofs stamping and literary horns waggling, what Revel gores is myths. After teaching in Florence, for instance, he wrote a book suggesting, among other heresies, that Italian men are far less virile than popular legend has it.

In France as a columnist for the weekly L'Express, Revel cast his beady eye upon a more solid target, sacred, large, fixed as a monument: Charles de Gaulle himself. Then Revel had a splendid idea. As a Frenchman in search of the ultimate heresy, why not--sacre bleu! --write a book in praise of the United States?

Without Marx or Jesus is the result. Already a bestseller in France, it promises to be one of those literary causes celebres that Americans like to discuss without necessarily reading. Revel operates from two unprovable premises with a passion for abstract generalization that seems extreme even for a Frenchman. Premise 1: "If mankind is to survive," Revel thunders, the world must have a revolution. Premise 2: Such a revolution can start only in the U.S.

But just what is the "absolutely necessary" and rather total transformation Revel calls for? Little short of Utopia. All Revel seems to expect is an end to "the notion of national sovereignty," some sort of "worldwide economic and educational equality," the "abolition of war," an "elimination of the possibility of internal dictatorship," and worldwide birth control.

His prescribed change, Revel asserts, is already taking place in these United States. As he goes through the motions of proving it, Revel spends a good deal of time trying to destroy myths that cynical Europeans and guilt-ridden natives share about the New World:

Myth No. 1: "Conformity" and "uniformity" are now the chief characteristics of American society. "The truth," Revel writes, "is that American society is torn by too many tensions not to become more and more diversified." He sees the U.S. as a healthy bundle of contradictions, "a diversity of mutually complementary, of alternative subcultures."

Myth No. 2: Americans are slaves to "gadgets." Revel's solemn counterclaim: "The truth is that there is no country in the world where automobiles, for example, are treated more like ordinary tools--or where people drive less like maniacs." Furthermore, making an assertion that will particularly outrage Europeans, he insists that "aesthetic" imagination is "more pronounced in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world."

Opinion v. Opinion. Myth No. 3: America is "the citadel of reaction." Revel's reply: Nothing quite as unreactionary as Ralph Nader or the mass opposition to Viet Nam has ever happened in Europe.

Feed Revel an opinion and he will answer it with an opinion. While putting down Russia, China, the Third World and, above all, France, Revel cannot for the life of him discover significant flaws in the U.S. He likes Andy Warhol movies. He loves Playboy ("One of the most progressive magazines in America"). He even recommends American TV (with all those channels "it is more like being turned loose in a library"). What's more, he sees them all as part of the revolution. Not only blacks, Jesus freaks and grape workers but near-Establishment liberals get abstracted into a single morality-play figure, labeled "The Dissenter." "There is more revolutionary spirit in the United States today, even on the Right," cries Revel, "than there is on the Left anywhere else."

Is Revel France's answer to Charles Reich--a 1971 champion of the sweeping statement? Not quite. Beneath the extravagances he is a shrewd polemicist out to score a fair rebuttal point: that America is not as bad as most Europeans--and many Americans--think it is. In other words, the New World is still a source of revolutionary hope. But the modern sin of overstatement runs away with Revel. Before he can stop, he is dreaming of a revolution that will spread from the U.S. by "a sort of political osmosis" until it arrives at its logical conclusion: "world government" and--glory, glory--"Homo novus, a new man very different from other men."

The myth slayer has ended by creating his own myth. Still, Revel's act of provocation works pretty well within its own terms, and his corrective exaggerations should also have their good effects. At the very least, the author will become the pundit of the season. Writing grand-design scenarios of the future is a more popular art now than science fiction, even if less reliable. But how truly has the word expert been defined as "a man away from home!"

.Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.