GRIM JOKES AND POETIC GORE

THE FETISHIST

By Michel Tournier. Translated by Barbara Wright. 212 pp. New York: Doubleday & Company. $13.95.

By Victor Brombert

IN one of the most haunting stories by Michel Tournier - arguably France's finest novelist today - a

photographer destroys her male model by devising

a method that immerses him directly in a developing bath of chemicals, enswathing him like a corpse in a shroud to achieve on the cloth the photographic equivalent of a funerary frieze. Does art feed on death? In another story, life seems to take its revenge. The golden, incorporeal voice of a spellbinding radio announcer with the mythical name of Tristan Vox is destroyed by banality itself - in the form of a jealous secretary and a jealous wife. Art and life seem to be interlocked in a deadly struggle.

Mr. Tournier is a disturbing virtuoso. His technical range is stunning. His prose is sensuous and muscular; it can be colloquial, stylized, restrained, exuberant. Tones shift, as he quickly moves from realism to irony to the whimsical to the violently preposterous. His dialogues and situations often have the flavor of the theater of the absurd. His rhetoric is at once opulent and precise - as precise and cutting as the old-fashioned razor with which the little boy, in one of the stories in ''The Fetishist,'' emasculates himself. Mr. Tournier has a sense of comedy, but even his jokes are grim. His humor shakes the edifice of received ideas and casts a light of suspicion on the games we play. In an interview he once tried to define his sense of the comic: ''The more I laugh, the less I joke.''

Horror is never distant, especially when the world evoked seems at first reassuringly familiar. But the devouring ogre is lurking; daydreams swiftly turn into nightmares. The grotesque reintroduces into the commonplace the troubling and revelatory dimension of myth. Mr. Tournier's starting point is often the routine of daily life, with its layers of boredom. The ennui of the young woman in the story called ''Death and the Maiden'' points to a Baudelairean attraction to cruelty and death. Her indulgence in ''muggy, voluptuous hours,'' her fascination with the ''dense, viscid slime'' of existence have Sartrean overtones. (Mr. Tournier has called Sartre his master and spiritual father). In fact, Mr. Tournier's world is more akin to that of the fairy tale - a world of monsters, deviations and metamorphoses, which exorcise our old fears and initiate us to new ones. But the stories he writes are fairy tales for adults only.

A born narrator, a writer capable of elegant understatement as well as baroque profusion, Mr. Tournier has already given ample proof that, contrary to rumors, French fiction is very much alive. So much has been said, especially in France, about the demise of the novel that even novelists have begun to take seriously these obituaries written chiefly by self-serving critics whose not-so-secret claim is that criticism can be a substitute for the austere grandeur of real art. In a series of novels - ''Friday,'' ''The Ogre,'' ''The Four Wise Men'' - he has demonstrated that, as a fiction maker, he is a worthy successor of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Sartre and Louis Guilloux.

IN ''The Fetishist,'' a collection of 14 widely different

short texts, Mr. Tournier demonstrates what a literary artist can do in the concentrated form of the

story, tale or novella. Whether he stylizes a concrete situation or derives plots from an abstract idea (he shuttles back and forth between the two formulas), Mr. Tournier produces dramatic narratives whose impact is directly related to the economy of means. The ''knot of hatred'' that leads a dwarf to kill the beautiful woman whose lover he has become, the obsession with women's underwear that leads the fetishist to acts of violence, the lethal artistic experiments of the photographer - these are some of the situations Mr. Tournier exploits to illustrate how the literary craft can at the same time project and tame an omnipresent irrationality.

Some of the stories may appear excessive. One of the cruelest, yet most successful, places a little boy in the reassuringly familiar yet somewhat uncanny setting of a public park. The mythological statues, the park keeper, the lady in charge of the chairs, the lollypop vendor, the loquacious attendant at the comfort station, the merry-go-round, the boxwood maze - all take on an increasingly ominous quality. The horrible act of self- mutilation at the end hardly comes as a surprise. Other situations are less bloody. ''The Woodcock'' (its French title, ''Le Coq de Bruy ere,'' is the original title for the entire collection) tells of the disasters of old age in an anachronistic provincial setting and reveals marital faithlessness and conjugal fidelity in the same couple. Perhaps the most poetic text is the one that describes the relation of a little girl to a cat and to the neighboring wild garden; it is the story of the initiation of a preadolescent into the mysteries of nature and also the story of her awakening senses. But once again, some blood, just a trickle it is true, punctuates the end.

Some readers may find hard to take what Mr. Tournier himself described to a reporter as his attraction to the ''sordid supernatural.'' When his first novels appeared, there were those who took offense at the mixture of scatology and fantasy. More serious, in an artistic perspective, might be the charge that his writing is at times forced, didactic, culturally overdetermined, burdened with literary and legendary referents. While these traits may be seen as flaws, they in fact enhance the thematic richness of Mr. Tournier's stories. Some themes are favored: the painful initiation into a masculine world, nostalgia for lost innocence, the childlikeness of the adult, the affinities between the monster and the clown, the even greater bond between the ogre and the child, the fascination with triviality raised to the level of the demonic.

Mr. Tournier, whose novel ''The Ogre'' has more than a marginal relation to the Holocaust, doubtless projects a far-reaching malaise induced by the traumas of modern history and the politics of ideologies. This malaise comes across most powerfully in those stories in ''The Fetishist'' where suicidal instincts are revealed through metaphysical yearnings. Transcendence is ultimately always seen as lethal.

The beauty of Mr. Tournier's language, as well as the inner vibrato, comes across surprisingly well in this translation by Barbara Wright. One may wonder, though, why it was necessary to change some names (Bidoche becomes Gammon, Robinet becomes Fawcett, Coquebin becomes Greenhorn); this is rather silly, and unfitting. And one may regret that no one alerted the translator to the fact that Bergson's theory on laughter does not say that it is ''a mechanism overlaying a conscious being'' (which makes no sense), but rather that laughter occurs whenever something mechanical is arbitrarily forced onto something alive - an idea that points to the anxiety of a fundamental rift or imbalance that laughter simultaneously hides and reveals. Such an anxiety lies at the heart of Mr. Tournier's work.B

In Competition With God Michel Tournier writes very adult books, but five of his more than a dozen published volumes are children's books and he thinks that writing for children is a higher art. The paradoxes of this man who writes unconventionally about sex and intriguingly about God appeared clearly this year in an article about St. Sebastian, one of his favorite saints, an early Christian martyr whom Mr. Tournier sees as a symbol of Christianity's conversion from a Middle Eastern cult to a Western faith, and a rather sensual faith at that: ''Sebastian equals eros plus Jesus.'' Such controversial ideas come from a man who doesn't think celebrity contributes much to a writer's career: ''Hell is an author whom everyone knows and no one reads.'' Yet Mr. Tournier is widely seen here as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in Literature. He has the literary credentials: he was the first unanimous winner of the Prix Goncourt and later received the Prix de l'Academie Fran,caise. He is now a member of the Goncourt prize jury and helps select books for the prestigious publishing house, Gallimard. He had been writing unpublished novels for years, when in his 20's and 30's he was studying law and philosophy and working in television and radio. The first draft of ''The Ogre'' was completed in 1958; when it was finally published, it won him the Goncourt prize in 1970. Mr. Tournier is a writer who deals in myth, a creator of fantastic stories, and he disdains writers who traffic in theories. Recently in Le Monde he discussed how a writer can use his rational powers to alter the world around him. He set himself a formidable model: ''Like all creators, the only being whose place I lay a claim to absolutely is God.'' - E. J. Dionne Jr.