BUT TAOR HAD A SWEET TOOTH

THE FOUR WISE MEN By Michel Tournier. Translated by Ralph Manheim. 255 pp. New York: Doubleday & Co. $14.95.

IN his first novel, ''Friday,'' the highly regarded French novelist Michel Tournier reversed the relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, with Friday, who is less limited than Crusoe, emerging as the ascendant figure. The novel, which transcended the cleverness of its idea, reimagined Defoe's fable into a resonant fable of its own. In ''The Four Wise Men,'' Mr. Tournier again shows himself to be a philosophic novelist who likes to work with received material - the story of the Magi in this case -and play ironic variations on his subject, a writer for whom paradox and irony become a source of vision.

Each of the title figures in ''The Four Wise Men'' presents himself directly to the reader. Gaspar, King of Meroe, opens the novel by announcing: ''I am black, but I am a king. One day, perhaps, I shall have this paraphrase of the Shulamite's song - I am black but beautiful - engraved on the tympanum of my palace. For what greater beauty can there be than a king's crown? To my mind that was so solidly established a certainty that I did not so much as think of it. Until the day when blondness burst into my life.'' The stylized rhetoric of the voice does not invite us to empathize. Mr. Tournier's language, a mix of modern idiom and literary diction (assuming the accuracy of Ralph Manheim's translation), enforces distance. These Wise Men are emblematic figures rather than particularized characters.

The blondness that bursts into Gaspar's life is, in one of its manifestations, the blonde slave girl, Biltine, with whom he becomes infatuated and by whom he is deceived and deeply disillusioned. Coincidence becomes omen. One blond symbol leads to another; the comet that prefigures the birth of the Christ Child appears to Gaspar like a head with flowing blond hair. But the diminishing of self-love that comes with rejection opens Gaspar to the possibility of divine love. In each of the separate stories that comprise this novel, we are made aware of the uncanny connection of seemingly contradictory experiences.

The wisest of the Wise Men, Balthasar, King of Nippur, is an esthete, a collector of exquisite objects. ''The one passion of my youth,'' he tells us in characteristically inflated rhetoric, ''was the love of pure, simple beauty, which, I believed - and still believe -would instill in me the sense of justice and political instinct I would need to govern my people.'' Mistaking image for reality, Balthasar marries a woman he has never met on the basis of her portrait and then finds her less compelling than her picture. After becoming disillusioned with marriage, Balthasar travels around the world collecting art treasures, which he houses in a museum called the Balthasareum. The museum becomes an extension of his pride, the justification, as he says, ''of my whole life.'' When the museum is destroyed by rioters, Balthasar's life is also destroyed. The king turns old with magical suddenness. ''My hair turned white, my back bent, my ears began to fail me, my legs grew heavy, and my member shriveled.'' Catastrophe becomes the occasion of wisdom and renewal. Balthasar moves from beauty to Beauty, the Child representing to him (as it does to each of the others) the most perfect example of his heart's desire.

ALL of the Wise Men's stories have the same configuration: Profound loss leads to greater gain. It is through inventive detail that Mr.Tournier must distinguish the stories - and the characters - from one another. Melchior, Prince of Palmyra, is a king without a kingdom, his throne (like Hamlet's) usurped by his uncle after his father's death. A wanderer and exile, the young prince has to beg from door to door for his livelihood. He is often rebuffed because of the proud look on his face - a manifestation of his sense of himself as a wronged king. Privation eventually engenders a certain humility. Melchior comes to realize ''that king, bandit and beggar have this in common: living outside the usual workaday world, they acquire nothing by toil or exchange.'' After he sees the Child, Melchior is content to renounce his earthly kingdom.

Although retold with considerable wit, there are few surprises in the stories of Gaspar, Balthasar and Melchior. The tour de force of Mr. Tournier's novel is the invention of a fourth Wise Man, Taor, Prince of Mangalore - also known as the Prince of Sweets. A pampered dilettante with a sweet tooth, Taor embarks on a long, quixotic journey, ostensibly to locate the recipe of a delicacy called pistachio rahat loukoum. It is an absurd - really absurdist - Grail quest, and his mission predictably comes to grief. He arrives too late to see the Child, whom he conceives as the Divine Confectioner, and finds himself ultimately in the hellish landscape of Sodom on the edge of the Dead Sea. Through an act of sacrifice, the most apparently trivial of the kings emerges as the most substantial and humane. Taor's career embodies aspects of the careers of the other three kings (and that of Christ as well). His story, which is the most affecting of the four, serves to unite the disparate fables of the novel.

ALMOST every episode in Mr. Tournier's novel reduces itself to stunning paradox. As Balthasar tells us and the novel illustrates over and over again, ''the answer consisted in the impossible marriage of irreconcilable opposites.'' ''The Four Wise Men'' is a work of extraordinary clarity, but it is a clarity born, I suspect, of preconception and formulation. Compare Michel Tournier's novel with George Bernanos's masterpiece, ''Diary of a Country Priest,'' which has similar spiritual concerns, and its limitations - its reductive simplicity - become all the more obvious. The great novels engender discovery as they go along, surprise themselves as they surprise the reader. ''The Four Wise Men'' knows everything it knows before it starts out on its journey.