THE STUFF OF MARVELS

GEMINI By Michel Tournier. Translated by Anne Carter. 452 pp. New York: Doubleday & Co. $14.95.

IN ''Paris Peasant,'' one of the key texts of Surrealism, Louis Aragon speaks of his ''sense of the marvelous suffusing everyday life.'' Defining reality as ''the apparent absence of contradiction,'' he explains that ''the marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.'' The surrealist's task, as Aragon sees it, is to reveal contradictions or denials of what is commonly held to be the case - and it requires a relentless intensity of vision, powered by an innately iconoclastic form of intellectual energy. It is this task that Michel Tournier, whose previous novel ''The Ogre'' won France's prestigious Prix Goncourt, has set himself in his supercharged new novel. Echoing Aragon's 55-year-old thesis, Tournier makes one of his characters reflect that ''underneath its apparent banality, the world is decidedly full of barely concealed wonders - just like Ali Baba's cave.'' On the enormous loom of ''Gemini,'' Tournier weaves banalities into wonders: rubbish dumps, a tapeworm, Venetian honeymoons, even the weather are here transmuted into the stuff of marvels.

''Gemini'' is about a pair of identical twins, collectively known as Jean-Paul. Saying this, however, is a bit like saying that ''Ulysses'' is about a man walking around Dublin, because Tournier uses the theme of twinship to explore a near infinity of dualities. In addition to playing with such traditional oppositions as heterosexuality and homosexuality, city and countryside, heaven and hell, Tournier elaborates ingeniously on the profound opposition of chronology and meteorology - the fixed, regulated march of the hours on the one hand and the wild, unpredictable fluctuation of the seasons on the other. And, in a passage of startling metaphysical originality, one of the characters says that ''Christ has to be superseded'' - not, in Manichaean terms, by Satan, but by the allencompassing Spirit, the Holy Ghost.

Clearly, ''Gemini'' is not light reading; and yet, such is the electricity of Tournier's intelligence that for most of this mammoth book the reader is mesmerized by the daring of the conception and the audacity with which the author carries it off. The magic wanes in the last third of the novel, but by then the momentum that has been built up by this unique text is strong enough to sweep us to the superbly right finale.

''Gemini'' begins with a description of the weather conditions on September 25, 1937, in Les Pierres Sonnantes, a small community on the Breton coast. In Les Pierres Sonnantes - the ''Sounding Stones'' - live the twin boys Jean and Paul, so alarmingly identical that their parents cannot tell them apart; in one memorable incident, when their father Edouard mixes up photographs of the pair, Jean is unable to distinguish himself from his other half. The twins are a complete organism: they speak their own language, ''Aeolian'' (named after Aeolus, the wind god); their abiding interest is in their private game of Bep - ''the great geminate game'' of lying entwined, head to tail, in an echo of their position in the womb. For Paul, the dominant twin, twinship is unquestionably superior to ''normal'' existence; his twinned life is a treasure to be preserved at all costs. ''Every pregnant woman carries two children in her womb,'' he imagines. ''But the stronger will not tolerate the presence of a brother ... and, having strangled him, he eats him. ... Mankind is made up of ogres. ... We alone, you understand, are innocent. We alone came into this world hand in hand, a smile of brotherhood on our lips.''

But Jean, the other twin, rebels. Twinship, for him, has become a cage. His early attempts at asserting his independence sometimes misfire: insisting that his mother let Paul and him go shopping for clothes separately, Jean returns home having chosen garments identical in every respect to those selected by his brother. Years later, when Jean attempts to marry, Paul drives Jean's fiancee, Sophie, away, by first seducing her and then horrifying her with the realization that Jean has come to her from his, Paul's, bed. But Jean does break away from Paul, and this break represents a moment of transformation for the novel itself.

Before that, however, we have spent a good deal of time away from the twins and their weak father, Edouard, and their earthmother, Maria-Barbara; away, too, from the mentally handicapped children at St. Brigitte's next door - children whose enforced enclosure in a solipsistic world forms a wholly unsentimentalized echo of the twins' self-absorption.

This time is spent in the company of the twins' ''shocking uncl e,''Alexandre, who makes of his homosexuality a t otem almost as powerful as Paul's theory of twinship. Alexandre's exuberance gives the first half of the book much of its drive and verve; he lives dangerously, walking the streets with the trusty sword stick he dubs Fleurette in search of conventionally oriented males: ''Heterosexuals are my women,'' he reveals. He is the manager of a garbage firm called TURDCO (The Urban Refusal Disposal Company), and in the sections of the book narrated by him he turns this ''lunar landscape'' of refuse into a world of revelations, a repository of truths that society seeks to dispose of but that it cannot hide from its garbagemen. To take just one instance,the rubbish train from Paris brings Alexandre strange casualties of the times: ''Hundreds of thousands of dead dogs! ... Thirty-five wagonloads of them!'' Because the fleeing Parisians have abandoned their pets, and the Nazis have had them massacred. Tournier's passages in praise of refuse are the product of perverse genius; in them, Tournier performs the vertiginously difficult feat of imbuing the filth of the world with a kind of radiance and meaning. (It is easy to see why Jean Genet thinks so highly of this book.)

Alexandre is, in a way, killed by the twins. He keeps seeing a beautiful young man in Casablanca, and not recognizing him as one or the other of his twin nephews, whom he is seeing at different times, he falls in love with this ''ubiquitous boy.'' When he stumbles across the twins performing their rite of ''geminate union'' and understands that there is no chance for him to compete with such completeness, he deliberately goes into the murderous docks of Casablanca at night and is killed. As a homosexual, he is, after all, only a counterfeit twin: ''He is usurping a condition which does not belong to him.''

Alexandre dies. The twins' mother is sent to Buchenwald. Their father doesn't last much longer. Paul chases Sophie away from Jean, and this deed splits the twins for good. Jean takes off on a long odyssey around the world, ''throwing himself,'' to escape from Paul, ''into the arms of anyone he meets.'' Paul, of course, pursues him. And the book changes. Mirroring the twins' eruption out of geminate completeness into lone, global wandering, the novel becomes linear, sequential, episodic - and a good deal less gripping. Intellectually, it remains rigorous and satisfying, showing how Paul's pursuit of Jean changes into a determination to have all Jean's experiences after him; and then, when Paul accepts that he may never find Jean again, his journey becomes an expression of what a friend of Alexandre's describes as universal didymy: ''The unpaired twin died and a brother to all men was born in his place.''

What this section lacks is more traditionally novelistic satisfactions: the global journey cannot avoid sounding, all too often, like a travelogue as Paul follows Jean from Venice to North Africa, Japan, Canada and then back to Europe; the characters encountered are inevitably minor. The ending, however - in which Paul surmounts an accident that maims his left limbs by an act of almost supranatural will - is worth waiting for.

There is no doubt that ''Gemini,'' excellently translated by Anne Carter, is a book of rare intelligence, originality and that intensity of sight of which Aragon was also a master. Tournier and Aragon are far from being twins, however: ''Gemini'' is a novel impregnated with theology, after all, and Aragon's view of God was that he was ''a disgusting and vulgar idea.''

But then again, as this novel amply demonstrates, Michel Tournier can take just about any idea, no matter how vulgar or disgusting, and give it meaning.