Don’t Blame It on Rio : THE SUN IN CAPRICORN <i> by Paul Rosenblatt (Watermark Press: $18.50; 185 pp.) </i>

Vance Bourjaily calls this novel “elegant and absorbing.” Bob Shacochis labels it “extraordinary.” Andrew Greeley says it’s “profoundly moving,” and Scott Momaday opines that “The Sun in Capricorn” is a “performance of real quality.” On the other hand, the Watermark Press operates out of Wichita, Kan., and not to denigrate Wichita in any way, but still, it’s not the publishing capital of the United States.

This is a book full of messages for Literate America, and those messages are terribly important, though not, perhaps, the messages the author intended. The author, Paul Rosenblatt, is a professor of American literature. He was also a visiting professor of American literature at the University of Brazil. “The Sun in Capricorn” is about a professor of American literature who teaches for a year in Rio de Janiero. The fictional professor gets mixed up with a scholarly revolutionary. The author readily acknowledges that the idea for this revolutionary came initially from a magazine piece written in 1970 by Sanche de Gramont, and, beyond that, the revolutionary is “in name and being, work of the imagination.”

All these facts bring up several issues. This novel, or at least the ideas in it, are 20 years old. (Sanche de Gramont has even changed his name to Ted Morgan!) Remember, Rosenblatt, the author, is a professor of American lit. At one point, his fictional protagonist, Prof. Jonathan, is asked to leave Brazil, but he’s passionate about staying: “He had come thousands of miles to talk with them about Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne and Melville and Whitman and Dickinson and James and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner and Bellow and Stevens and Williams and Frost and would they not want to begin?”

In fact, a general strike and revolution is raging in the streets, and in what we laughingly call real life, real students might want to put off reading “The House of the Seven Gables” while they catch up on their Molotov-cocktail-making, but since this is fiction, they attend the professor’s classes, and a character says admiringly, “While this strike lasts, the University of Brazil is in fact an American university.”

I want to say this as kindly as possible but still be clear about it. A few white males of a certain age still have a very strong fantasy life, and they’re not going to give up those fantasies under any circumstances. This novel is a clear reflection of the phenomenon of which I speak. These fantasies have to do with conquering and with sexuality, and--in the case of academicians--of reading too many books by Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. The conquering aspects of these literary fantasies have to do with bringing the good word to Third World countries. Emerson in Brazil? Well, they need it just the way the Papal Nuncio in Panama needed round-the-clock doses of rock ‘n’ roll music last month. American culture is good and good for you.

In these fantasies, so dearly held, women think, act and talk in a really strange way. (We have James Joyce and his famous Molly-monologue to thank for that.) Thus, when the Professor’s wife experiences menstrual spotting, she thinks: “Stigmata . . . the drollery of it . . . I am endowed. I have envisioned and I have come to see that which came to pass.” Later, when she’s trying to get information about her husband from a friend, she has to “ . . . open those vacant eyes of his with her presence and he would say something and close his eyes and fade again and die, he now knowing and waiting for the alternate rhythm, the surety of her vital power bringing him back, of reviviscence in the still pool of evening lamplight.” That’s just half the sentence. It goes on for 12 lines.

Most sacred in the fantasies is the ghost of poor Hemingway himself. (If you asked the few men left in this terrible thrall which book they’d save from a burning building, the Bible or “The Sun Also Rises,” they’d have to give the secular answer.) Thus, most of the novel reads like entries in the Bad Hemingway Contest: “He had been smoking and drinking and watching the girls go by. He had been looking upon the beach and the ocean and the mountains rising like humpbacked whales. . . .” (Sugar Loaf--that’s some whale , Professor!)

The point here is not to say that this book is lousy, but rather to remind all of us that times have changed. South America has its own voices, perhaps more eloquent than Bellow, than Williams. The American Lit-List itself has changed. Toni Morrison goes there, Marge Piercy, Amy Tan, James Baldwin. The language of our literature and the nature of our American reality have changed. I don’t care what Vance, Bob, Andrew or Scott say. The conquest-and-sexuality fantasies of the early 20th Century have gone limp. “The Sun in Capricorn” was published in Wichita. That has to tell you something.

(For those who still have to know the plot: A professor of American lit with a frigid wife finds himself in Brazil where he has a chance to have sex with many beautiful mulattas but doesn’t. He gets mixed up with a student revolutionary and/or a “doppleganger.” There is a gun fight, but the professor gets out OK and goes back to his wife.)