FRENCH LETTERS: THEORIES OF THE NEW NOVEL

To say that no one now much likes novels is to exaggerate very little. The large public which used to find pleasure in prose fictions prefers movies, television, journalism, and books of “fact.” But then, Americans have never been enthusiastic readers. According to Dr. Gallup, only five percent of our population can be regarded as habitual readers. This five percent is probably a constant minority from generation to generation, despite the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century there were as many bookstores in the United States as there are today. It is true that novels in paperback often reach a very large audience. But that public is hardly serious, if one is to believe a recent New York Times symposium on paperback publishing. Apparently novels sell not according to who wrote them but according to how they are presented, which means that Boys and Girls Together will outsell Pale Fire, something it did not do in hard cover. Except for a handful of entertainers like the late Ian Fleming, the mass audience knows nothing of authors. They buy titles, and most of those titles are not of novels but of nonfiction: books about the Kennedys, doctors, and vivid murders are preferred to the work of anyone’s imagination no matter how agreeably debased.

In this, if nothing else, the large public resembles the clerks, one of whom, Norman Podhoretz, observed nine years ago that “A feeling of dissatisfaction and impatience, irritation and boredom with contemporary serious fiction is very widespread,” and he made the point that the magazine article is preferred to the novel because the article is useful, specific, relevant—something that most novels are not. This liking for fact may explain why some of our best-known novelists are read with attention only when they comment on literary or social matters. In the highest intellectual circles, a new novel by James Baldwin or William Gass or Norman Mailer—to name at random three celebrated novelists—is apt to be regarded with a certain embarrassment, hostage to a fortune often too crudely gained, and bearing little relation to its author’s distinguished commentaries.

An even odder situation exists in the academy. At a time when the works of living writers are used promiscuously as classroom texts, the students themselves do little voluntary reading. “I hate to read,” said a Harvard senior to a New York Times reporter, “and I never buy any paperbacks.” The undergraduates’ dislike of reading novels is partly due to the laborious way in which novels are taught: the slow killing of the work through a close textual analysis. Between the work and the reader comes the explication, and the explicator is prone to regard the object of analysis as being somehow inferior to the analysis itself.

In fact, according to Saul Bellow, “Critics and professors have declared themselves the true heirs and successors of the modern classic authors.” And so, in order to maintain their usurped dignity, they are given “to redescribing everything downward, blackening the present age and denying creative scope to their contemporaries.” Although Mr. Bellow overstates the case, the fact remains that the novel as currently practiced does not appeal to the intellectuals any more than it does to the large public, and it may well be that the form will become extinct now that we have entered the age which Professor Marshall McLuhan has termed post-Gutenberg. Whether or not the Professor’s engaging generalities are true (that linear type, for centuries a shaper of our thought, has been superseded by electronic devices), it is a fact that the generation now in college is the first to be brought up entirely within the tradition of television and differs significantly from its predecessors. Quick to learn through sight and sound, today’s student often experiences difficulty in reading and writing. Linear type’s warm glow, so comforting to Gutenberg man, makes his successors uncomfortably hot. Needless to say, that bright minority which continues the literary culture exists as always, but it is no secret that even they prefer watching movies to reading novels. John Barth ought to interest them more than Antonioni, but he doesn’t.

For the serious novelist, however, the loss of the audience should not be disturbing. “I write,” declared one of them serenely. “Let the reader learn to read.” And contrary to Whitman, great audiences are not necessary for the creation of a high literature. The last fifty years have been a particularly good time for poetry in English, but even that public which can read intelligently knows very little of what has been done. Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand. It is immodest and greedy to want more. Unhappily, the novelist, by the very nature of his coarse art, is greedy and immodest; unless he is read by everyone, he cannot delight, instruct, reform, destroy a world he wants, at the least, to be different for his having lived in it. Writers as various as Dickens and Joyce, as George Eliot and Proust, have suffered from this madness. It is the nature of the beast. But now the beast is caged, confined by old forms that have ceased to attract. And so the question is: can those forms be changed, and the beast set free?

Since the Second World War, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget, among others, have attempted to change not only the form of the novel but the relationship between book and reader, and though their experiments are taken most seriously on the Continent, they are still too little known and thought about in those countries the late General de Gaulle believed to be largely populated by Anglo-Saxons. Among American commentators, only Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, published in 1966, has made a sustained effort to understand what the French are doing, and her occasional essays on their work are well worth reading, not only as reflections of an interesting and interested mind but also because she shares with the New Novelists (as they loosely describe themselves) a desire for the novel to become “what it is not in England and America, with rare and unrelated exceptions: a form of art which people with serious and sophisticated [sic] taste in the other arts can take seriously.” Certainly Miss Sontag finds nothing adventurous or serious in “the work of the American writers most admired today: for example, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, William Styron, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud.” They are “essentially unconcerned with the problems of the novel as an art form. Their main concern is with their ‘subjects.’” And because of this, she finds them “essentially unserious and unambitious.” By this criterion, to be serious and ambitious in the novel, the writer must create works of prose comparable to those experiments in painting which have brought us to Pop and Op art and in music to the strategic silences of John Cage. Whether or not these experiments succeed or fail is irrelevant. It is enough, if the artist is serious, to attempt new forms; certainly he must not repeat old ones.

The two chief theorists of the New Novel are Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. As novelists, their works do not much resemble one another or, for that matter, conform to each other’s strictures. But it is as theorists not as novelists that they shall concern us here. Of the two, Alain Robbe-Grillet has done the most to explain what he thinks the New Novel is and is not, in Snapshots and For a New Novel, translated by Richard Howard (1965). To begin with, he believes that any attempt at controlling the world by assigning it a meaning (the accepted task of the traditional novelist) is no longer possible. At best, meaning was

an illusory simplification; and far from becoming clearer and clearer because of it, the world has only, little by little, lost all its life. Since it is chiefly in its presence that the world’s reality resides, our task is now to create a literature which takes that presence into account.

He then attacks the idea of psychological “depth” as a myth. From the Comtesse de La Fayette to Gide, the novelist’s role was to burrow “deeper and deeper to reach some ever more intimate strata.” Since then, however, “something” has been “changing totally, definitively in our relations with the universe.” Though he does not define that ominous “something,” its principal effect is that “we no longer consider the world as our own, our private property, designed according to our needs and readily domesticated.” Consequently:

the novel of characters belongs entirely to the past; it describes a period: and that which marked the apogee of the individual. Perhaps this is not an advance, but it is evident that the present period is rather one of administrative numbers. The world’s destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise or fall of certain men, of certain families.

Nathalie Sarraute is also concerned with the idea of man the administrative number in Tropisms and in The Age of Suspicion, translated by Maria Jolas (1964). She quotes Claude-Edmonde Magny: “Modern man, overwhelmed by mechanical civilization, is reduced to the triple determinism of hunger, sexuality and social status: Freud, Marx and Pavlov.” (Surely in the wrong order.) She, too, rejects the idea of human depth: “The deep uncovered by Proust’s analyses had already proved to be nothing but a surface.”

Like Robbe-Grillet, she sees the modern novel as an evolution from Dostoevsky-Flaubert to Proust-Kafka; and each agrees (in essays written by her in 1947 and by him in 1958) that one of its principal touchstones is Camus’s The Stranger, a work which she feels “came at the appointed time,” when the old psychological novel was bankrupt because, paradoxically, psychology itself, having gone deeper than ever before, “inspired doubts as to the ultimate value of all methods of research.” Homo absurdus, therefore, was Noah’s dove, the messenger of deliverance. Camus’s stranger is shown entirely from the inside, “all sentiment or thought whatsoever appears to have been completely abolished.” He has been created without psychology or memory; he exists in a perpetual present. Robbe-Grillet goes even further in his analysis:

It is no exaggeration to claim that it is things quite specifically which ultimately lead this man to crime: the sun, the sea, the brilliant sand, the gleaming knife, the spring among the rocks, the revolver…as, of course, among these things, the leading role is taken by Nature.

Only the absolute presence of things can be recorded; certainly the depiction of human character is no longer possible. In fact, Miss Sarraute believes that for both author and reader, character is “the converging point of their mutual distrust,” and she makes of Stendhal’s “The genius of suspicion has appeared on the scene” a leitmotiv for an age in which “the reader has grown wary of practically everything. The reason being that for some time now he has been learning too many things and he is unable to forget entirely all he had learned.” Perhaps the most vivid thing he has learned (or at least it was vivid when she was writing in 1947) is the fact of genocide in the concentration camps:

Beyond these furthermost limits to which Kafka did not follow them but to where he had the superhuman courage to precede them, all feeling disappears, even contempt and hatred; there remains only vast, empty stupefaction, definitive total, don’t understand.

To remain at the point where he left off or to attempt to go on from there are equally impossible. Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps.

The proof that human life can be as perfectly meaningless in the scale of a human society as it is in eternity stunned a generation, and the shock of this knowledge, more than anything else (certainly more than the discoveries of the mental therapists or the new techniques of industrial automation), caused a dislocation of human values which in turn made something like the New Novel inevitable.

Although Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet are formidable theorists, neither is entirely free of those rhetorical plangencies the French so often revert to when their best aperçus are about to slip the net of logic. Each is very much a part of that French intellectual tradition so wickedly described in Tristes Tropiques by Lévi-Strauss (1964, translated by John Russell):

First you establish the traditional “two views” of the question. You then put forward a common-sensical justification of the one, only to refute it by the other. Finally, you send them both packing by the use of a third interpretation, in which both the others are shown to be equally unsatisfactory. Certain verbal maneuvers enable you, that is, to line up the traditional “antitheses” as complementary aspects of a single reality: form and substance, content and container, appearance and reality, essence and existence, continuity and discontinuity, and so on. Before long the exercise becomes the merest verbalizing, reflection gives place to a kind of superior punning, and the “accomplished philosopher” may be recognized by the ingenuity with which he makes ever-bolder play with assonance, ambiguity, and the use of those words which sound alike and yet bear quite different meanings.

Miss Sarraute is not above this sort of juggling, particularly when she redefines literary categories, maintaining that the traditional novelists are formalists, while the New Novelists, by eschewing old forms, are the true realists because

their works, which seek to break away from all that is prescribed, conventional and dead, to turn towards what is free, sincere and alive, will necessarily, sooner or later, become ferments of emancipation and progress.

This fine demagoguery does not obscure the fact that she is obsessed with form in a way that the traditional writer seldom is. It is she, not he, who dreams

of a technique that might succeed in plunging the reader into the stream of those subterranean dreams of which Proust only had time to obtain a rapid aerial view, and concerning which he observed and reproduced nothing but the broad motionless lines. This technique would give the reader the illusion of repeating these actions himself, in a more clearly aware, more orderly, distinct and forceful manner than he can do in life, without their losing that element of indetermination, of opacity and mystery, that one’s own actions always have for the one who lives them.

This is perilously close to fine lady-writing (Miss Sarraute is addicted to the triad, particularly of adjectives), but despite all protestations, she is totally absorbed with form; and though she dislikes being called a formalist, she can hardly hope to avoid the label, since she has set herself the superb task of continuing consciously those prose experiments that made the early part of the twentieth century one of the great ages of the novel.

In regard to the modern masters, both Robbe-Grillet and Miss Sarraute remark with a certain wonder that there have been no true heirs to Proust, Joyce, and Kafka; the main line of the realistic novel simply resumed as though they had never existed. Yet, as Robbe-Grillet remarks:

Flaubert wrote the new novel of 1860, Proust the new novel of 1910. The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history, and that they have survived only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future.

Here, as so often in Robbe-Grillet’s theorizing, one is offered a sensible statement, followed by a dubious observation about survival (many conventional, even reactionary works have survived nicely), ending with a look-to-the-dawn-of-a-new-age chord, played fortissimo. Yet the desire to continue the modern tradition is perfectly valid. And even if the New Novelists do not succeed (in science most experiments fail), they are at least “really serious,” as Miss Sontag would say.

There is, however, something very odd about a literary movement so radical in its pronouncements yet so traditional in its references. Both Miss Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet continually relate themselves to great predecessors, giving rise to the suspicion that, like Saul Bellow’s literary usurpers, they are assuming for themselves the accomplishments of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, and Beckett. In this, at least, they are significantly more modest than their heroes. One cannot imagine the Joyce of Finnegans Wake acknowledging a literary debt to anyone or Flaubert admitting—as Robbe-Grillet does—that his work is “merely pursuing a constant evolution of a genre.” Curiously enough, the writers whom Robbe-Grillet and Miss Sarraute most resemble wrote books which were described by Arthur Symons for the Encyclopaedia Britannica as being

made up of an infinite number of details, set side by side, every detail equally prominent…. [the authors] do not search further than “the physical basis of life,” and they find everything that can be known of that unknown force written visibly upon the sudden faces of little incidents, little expressive movements…. It is their distinction—the finest of their inventions—that, in order to render new sensations, a new vision of things, they invented a new language.

They, of course, are the presently unfashionable brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, whose collaboration ended in 1870.

In attacking the traditional novel, both Robbe-Grillet and Miss Sarraute are on safe ground. Miss Sarraute is particularly effective when she observes that even the least aware of the traditionalists seems “unable to escape a certain feeling of uneasiness as regards dialogue.” She remarks upon the self-conscious way in which contemporary writers sprinkle their pages with “he saids” and “she replieds,” and she makes gentle fun of Henry Green’s hopeful comment that perhaps the novel of the future will be largely composed in dialogue since, as she quotes him, people don’t write letters any more: they use the telephone.

But the dialogue novel does not appeal to her, for it brings “the novel dangerously near the domain of the theater, where it is bound to be in a position of inferiority”—on the ground that the nuances of dialogue in the theater are supplied by actors while in the novel the writer himself must provide, somehow, the sub-conversation which is the true meaning. Opposed to the dialogue novel is the one of Proustian analysis. Miss Sarraute finds much fault with this method (no meaningful depths left to plumb in the wake of Freud), but concedes that “In spite of the rather serious charges that may be brought against analysis, it is difficult to turn from it today without turning one’s back on progress.”

“Progress,” “New Novel,” “permanent creation of tomorrow’s world,” “the discovery of reality will continue only if we abandon outward forms,” “general evolution of the genre”…again and again one is reminded in reading the manifestos of these two explorers that we are living (one might even say that we are trapped) in the age of science. Miss Sarraute particularly delights in using quasi-scientific references. She refers to her first collection of pieces as “Tropisms.” (According to authority, a tropism is “the turning of an organism, or part of one, in a particular direction in response to some special external stimulus.”) She is also addicted to words like “larval” and “magma,” and her analogies are often clinical: “Suspicion, which is by way of destroying the character and the entire outmoded mechanism that guaranteed its force, is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium….”

Yet she does not like to be called a “laboratory novelist” any more than she likes to be called a formalist. One wonders why. For it is obvious that both she and Robbe-Grillet see themselves in white smocks working out new formulas for a new fiction. Underlying all their theories is the assumption that if scientists can break the atom with an equation, a dedicated writer ought to be able to find a new form in which to redefine the “unchanging human heart,” as Bouvard might have said to Pécuchet. Since the old formulas have lost their efficacy, the novel, if it is to survive, must become something new; and so, to create that something new, they believe that writers must resort to calculated invention and bold experiment.

It is an interesting comment on the age that both Miss Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet take for granted that the highest literature has always been made by self-conscious avant-gardists. Although this was certainly true of Flaubert, whose letters show him in the laboratory, agonizing over that double genitive which nearly soured the recipe for Madame Bovary, and of Joyce, who spent a third of his life making a language for the night, Dostoevsky, Conrad, and Tolstoi—to name three novelists quite as great—were not much concerned with laboratory experiments. Their interest was in what Miss Sontag calls “the subject” and though it is true they did not leave the form of the novel as they found it, their art was not the product of calculated experiments with form so much as it was the result of their ability, by virtue of what they were, to transmute the familiar and make it rare. They were men of genius unobsessed by what Goethe once referred to as “an eccentric desire for originality.” Or as Saul Bellow puts it: “Genius is always, without strain, avant-garde. Its departure from tradition is not the result of caprice or of policy but of an inner necessity.”

Absorbed by his subject, the genius is a natural innovator—a fact which must be maddening to the ordinary writer, who, because he is merely ambitious, is forced to approach literature from the outside, hoping by the study of a masterpiece’s form and by an analysis of its content to reconstruct the principle of its composition in order that he may create either simulacra or, if he is furiously ambitious, by rearranging the component parts, something “new.” This approach from the outside is of course the natural way of the critic, and it is significant that the New Novelists tend to blur the boundary between critic and novelist. “Critical preoccupation,” writes Robbe-Grillet, “far from sterilizing creation, can on the contrary serve it as a driving force.”

In the present age the methods of the scientist, who deals only in what can be measured, demonstrated, and proved, are central. Consequently, anything as unverifiable as a novel is suspect. Or, as Miss Sarraute quotes Paul Tournier:

There is nobody left who is willing to admit that he invents. The only thing that matters is the document, which must be precise, dated, proven, authentic. Works of the imagination are banned, because they are invented…. The public, in order to believe what it is told, must be convinced that it is not being “taken in.” All that counts now is the “true fact.”

This may explain why so many contemporary novelists feel they must apologize for effects which seem unduly extravagant or made up (“but that’s the way it really happened!”). Nor is it to make a scandal to observe that most “serious” American novels are autobiographies, usually composed to pay off grudges. But then the novelist can hardly be held responsible for the society he reflects. After all, much of the world’s reading consists of those weekly news magazines in which actual people are dealt with in fictional terms. It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true. The result of this attitude has been particularly harrowing in the universities, where English departments now do their best to pretend that they are every bit as fact-minded as the physical scientists (to whom the largest appropriations go). Doggedly, English teachers do research, publish learned findings, make breakthroughs in F. Scott Fitzgerald and, in their search for facts, behave as if no work of literature can be called complete until each character has been satisfactorily identified as someone who actually lived and had a history known to the author. It is no wonder that the ambitious writer is tempted to re-create the novel along what he believes to be scientific lines. With admiration, Miss Sontag quotes William Burroughs:

I think there’s going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think that the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific.

Recently in France the matter of science and the novel was much debated. In an essay called Nouvelle Critique ou Nouvelle Imposture, Raymond Picard attacked the new critic Roland Barthes, who promptly defended himself on the ground that a concern with form is only natural since structure precedes creation (an insight appropriated from anthropology, a discipline recently become fashionable). Picard then returned to the attack, mocking those writers who pretend to be scientists, pointing out that they

improperly apply to the literary domain methods which have proved fruitful elsewhere but which here lose their efficiency and rigor…. These critical approaches have a scientific air to them, but the resemblance is pure caricature. The new critics use science roughly as someone ignorant of electricity might use electronics. What they’re after is its prestige: in other respects they are at opposite poles to the scientific spirit. Their statements generally sound more like oracles than useful hypotheses: categorical, unverifiable, unilluminating.

Picard is perhaps too harsh, but no one can deny that Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute often appropriate the language of science without understanding its spirit—for instance, one can verify the law of physics which states that there is no action without reaction, but how to prove the critical assertion that things in themselves are what caused Camus’s creature to kill? Yet if to revive a moribund art form writers find it helpful to pretend to be physicists, then one ought not to tease them unduly for donning so solemnly mask and rubber gloves. After all, Count Tolstoi thought he was a philosopher. But whether pseudo-scientists or original thinkers, neither Robbe-Grillet nor Miss Sarraute finds it easy to put theory into practice. As Robbe-Grillet says disarmingly: “It is easier to indicate a new form than to follow it without failure.” And he must be said to fail a good deal of the time: is there anything more incantatory than the repetition of the word “lugubre” in Last Year at Marienbad? Or more visceral than the repetition of the killing of the centipede in Jealousy? While Miss Sarraute finds that her later essays are “far removed from the conception and composition of my first book”—which, nevertheless, she includes in the same volume as the essays, with the somewhat puzzling comment that “this first book contains in nuce all the raw material that I have continued to develop in my later works.”

For Robbe-Grillet, the problem of the novel is—obviously—the problem of man in relation to his environment, a relationship which he believes has changed radically in the last fifty years. In the past, man attempted to personalize the universe. In prose, this is revealed by metaphor: “majestic peaks,” “huddled villages,” “pitiless sun.” “These anthropomorphic analogies are repeated too insistently, too coherently, not to reveal an entire metaphysical system.” And he attacks what he holds to be the humanistic view: “On the pretext that man can achieve only a subjective knowledge of the world, humanism decides to elect man the justification of everything.” In fact, he believes that humanists will go so far as to maintain that “it is not enough to show man where he is: it must further be proclaimed that man is everywhere.” Quite shrewdly he observes: “If I say ‘the world is man,’ I shall always gain absolution; while if I say things are things, and man is only man, I am immediately charged with a crime against humanity.”

It is this desire to remove the falsely human from the nature of things that is at the basis of Robbe-Grillet’s theory. He is arguing not so much against what Ruskin called “the pathetic fallacy,” as against our race’s tendency to console itself by making human what is plainly nonhuman. To those who accuse him of trying to dehumanize the novel, he replies that since any book is written by a man “animated by torments and passion,” it cannot help but be human. Nevertheless, “suppose the eyes of this man rest on things without indulgence, insistently: he sees them but he refuses to appropriate them.” Finally, “man looks at the world but the world does not look back at him, and so, if he rejects communion, he also rejects tragedy.” Inconsistently, he later quotes with admiration Joé Bousquet’s “We watch things pass by in order to forget that they are watching us die.”

Do those things watch or not? At times Miss Sarraute writes as if she thought they did. Her Tropisms are full of things invested with human response (“The crouched houses standing watch all along the gray streets”), but then she is not so strict as Robbe-Grillet in her apprehension of reality. She will accept “those analogies which are limited to the instinctive irresistible nature of the movements…produced in us by the presence of others, or by objects from the outside world.” For Robbe-Grillet, however, “All analogies are dangerous.”

Man’s consciousness has now been separated from his environment. He lives in a perpetual present. He possesses memory but it is not chronological. Therefore the best that the writer can hope to do is to impart a precise sense of man’s being in the present. To achieve this immediacy, Miss Sarraute favors “some precise dramatic action shown in slow motion” a world in which “time was no longer the time of real life but of a hugely amplified present.” While Robbe-Grillet, in commenting upon his film Last Year at Marienbad, declares:

The Universe in which the entire film occurs is, characteristically, in a perpetual present which makes all recourse to memory impossible. This is a world without a past, a world which is self-sufficient at every moment and which obliterates itself as it proceeds.

To him, the film is a ninety-minute fact without antecedents. “The only important ‘character’ is the spectator. In his mind unfolds the whole story which is precisely imagined by him.” The verb “imagine” is of course incorrect, while the adverb means nothing. The spectator is not imagining the film; he is watching a creation which was made in a precise historic past by a writer, a director, actors, cameramen, etc. Yet to have the spectator or reader involve himself directly and temporally in the act of creation continues to be Robbe-Grillet’s goal. He wants “a present which constantly invents itself” with “the reader’s creative assistance,” participating “in a creation, to invent in his turn the work—and the world—and thus to learn to invent his own life.” This is most ambitious. But the ingredients of the formula keep varying. For instance, in praising Raymond Roussel, Robbe-Grillet admires the author’s “investigation which destroys, in the writing itself, its own object.” Elsewhere: “The work must seem necessary but necessary for nothing; its architecture is without use; its strength is untried.” And again: “The genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of speaking. He must create a world but starting from nothing, from the dust….” It would not seem to be possible, on the one hand, to invent a world that would cause the reader to “invent his own life” while, on the other hand, the world in question is being destroyed as it is being created. Perhaps he means for the reader to turn to dust, gradually, page by page: not the worst of solutions.

No doubt there are those who regard the contradictions in Robbe-Grillet’s critical writing as the point to them—rather in the way that the boredom of certain plays or the incompetence of certain pictures are, we are assured, their achievement. Yet it is worrisome to be told that a man can create a world from nothing when that is the one thing he cannot begin to do, simply because, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot dispose of himself. Even if what he writes is no more than nouns and adjectives, who and what he is will subconsciously dictate order. Nothing human is random and it is nonsense to say:

Art is based on no truth that exists before it; and one may say that it expresses nothing but itself. It creates its own equilibrium and its own meaning. It stands all by itself…or else it falls.

Which reminds us of Professor Herzog’s plaintive response to the philosophic proposition that modern man at a given moment fell into the quotidian: so where was he standing before the fall? In any case, how can something unique, in Robbe-Grillet’s sense, rise or fall or be anything except itself? As for reflecting “no truth that existed before it,” this is not possible. The fact that the author is a man “filled with torments and passion” means that all sorts of “truths” are going to occur in the course of the writing. The act of composing prose is a demonstration not only of human will but of the desire to reflect truth—particularly if one’s instinct is messianic, and Robbe-Grillet is very much in that tradition. Not only does he want man “to invent his own life” (by reading Robbe-Grillet), but he proposes that today’s art is “a way of living in the present world, and of participating in the permanent creation of tomorrow’s world.” It also seems odd that a theory of the novel which demands total existence in a self-devouring present should be concerned at all with the idea of future time since man exists, demonstrably, only in the present—the future tense is a human conceit, on the order of “majestic peaks.” As for the use of the adjective “permanent,” one suspects that rhetoric, not thought, forced this unfortunate word from the author’s unconscious mind.

The ideal work, according to Robbe-Grillet, is

A text both “dense and irreducible” so perfect that it does not seem “to have touched,” an object so perfect that it would obliterate our tracks…. Do we not recognize here the highest ambition of every writer?

Further, the only meaning for the novel is the invention of the world. “In dreams, in memory, as in the sense of sight, our imagination is the organizing force of our life, of our world. Each man, in his turn, must reinvent the things around him.” Yet, referring to things, he writes a few pages later,

They refer to no other world. They are the sign of nothing but themselves. And the only contact man can make with them is to imagine them.

But how is one to be loyal to the actual fact of things if they must be reinvented? Either they are there or they are not. In any case, by filtering them through the imagination (reinvention), true objectivity is lost, as he himself admits in a further snarling of his argument: “Objectivity in the ordinary sense of the word—total impersonality of observation—is all too obviously an illusion. But freedom of observation should be possible and yet it is not”—because a “continuous fringe of culture (psychology, ethics, metaphysics, etc.) is added to things, giving them a less alien aspect.” But he believes that “humanizing” can be kept to a minimum, if we try “to construct a world both more solid and more immediate. Let it be first of all by their presence that objects and gestures establish themselves and let this presence continue to prevail over the subjective.” Consequently, the task of the New Novel is nothing less than to seek

new forms for the novel…forms capable of expressing (or of creating) new relations between man and the world, to all those who have determined to invent the novel, in other words, to invent man. Such writers know that the systematic repetition of the forms of the past is not only absurd and futile, but that it can even become harmful: blinding us to our real situation in the world today, it keeps us, ultimately, from constructing the world and man of tomorrow.

With the change of a noun or two, this could easily be the coda of an address on American foreign policy, delivered by Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to the ADA.

Like Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute regards Camus’s The Stranger as a point of departure. She sees the book’s immediate predecessors as “The promising art of the cinema” and “the wholesome simplicity of the new American novel.” Incidentally, she is quite amusing when she describes just what the effect of these “wholesome” novels was upon the French during the years immediately after the war:

By transporting the French reader into a foreign universe in which he had no foothold, [they] lulled his wariness, aroused in him the kind of credulous curiosity that travel books inspire, and gave him a delightful impression of escape into an unknown world.

It is reassuring to learn that these works were not regarded with any great seriousness by the French and that Horace McCoy was not finally the master they once hailed him. Apparently the American novel was simply a vigorous tonic for an old literature gone stale. Miss Sarraute is, however, sincerely admiring of Faulkner’s ability to involve the reader in his own world. To her the most necessary thing of all is “to dispossess the reader and entice him, at all costs, into the author’s territory. To achieve this the device that consists in referring to the leading characters as ‘I’ constitutes a means.” The use of the first person seems to her to be the emblem of modern art. (“Since Impressionism all pictures have been painted in the first person.”) And so, just as photography drove painters away from representing nature (ending such ancient arts as that of the miniaturist and the maker of portrait busts), the cinema “garners and perfects what is left of it by the novel.” The novel must now go where the camera may not follow. In this new country the reader has been aided by such modern writers as Proust and Joyce; they have so awakened his sensibilities that he is now able to respond to what is beneath the interior monologue, that “immense profusion of sensations, images, sentiments, memories, impulses, little larval actions that no inner language can convey.” For her, emphasis falls upon what she calls the sub-conversation, that which is sensed and not said, the hidden counterpoint to the stated theme (obviously a very difficult thing to suggest, much less write, since “no inner language can convey it”).

“Bosquet’s universe—ours—is a universe of signs,” writes Robbe-Grillet. “Everything in it is a sign; and not the sign of something else, something more perfect, situated out of reach, but a sign of itself, of that reality which asks only to be revealed.” This answer to Baudelaire’s The Salon of 1859 is reasonable (although it is anthropomorphic to suggest that reality asks to be revealed). Robbe-Grillet is equally reasonable in his desire for things to be shown, as much as possible, as they are.

In the future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be there before being something; and they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterably, eternally present, mocking their own “meaning,” that meaning which vainly tries to reduce them to the role of precarious tools, etc.

One agrees with him that the integrity of the nonhuman world should be honored. But what does he mean (that proscribed verb!) when he says that the objects will be there, after meaning has attempted to rape them? Does he mean that they will still exist on the page, in some way inviolate in their thing-ness? If he does, surely he is mistaken. What exists on the page is ink; or, if one wishes to give the ink designs their agreed-upon human meaning, letters have been formed to make words in order to suggest things not present. What is on the page are not real things but their word-shadows. Yet even if the things were there, it is most unlikely that they would be so human as to “mock their own meaning.” In an eerie way, Robbe-Grillet’s highly rhetorical style has a tendency to destroy his arguments even as he makes them; critically, this technique complements ideally the self-obliterating anecdote.

On the question of how to establish the separateness, the autonomy of things, Robbe-Grillet and Miss Sarraute part company. In contemplating her method, she ceases altogether to be “scientific.” Instead she alarmingly intones a hymn to words—all words—for they “possess the qualities needed to seize upon, protect and bring out into the open those subterranean movements that are at once impatient and afraid.” (Are those subterranean movements really “impatient and afraid”?) For her, words possess suppleness, freedom, iridescent richness of shading, and by their nature they are protected “from suspicion and from minute examination.” (In an age of suspicion, to let words off scot-free is an act of singular trust.) Consequently, once words have entered the other person, they swell, explode, and “by virtue of this game of actions and reactions…they constitute a most valuable tool for the novelist.” Which, as the French say, goes without saying.

But of course words are not at all what she believes they are. All words lie. Or as Professor Frank Kermode put it in Literary Fiction and Reality: “Words, thoughts, patterns of word and thought, are enemies of truth, if you identify that with what may be had by phenomenological reductions.” Nevertheless, Miss Sarraute likes to think that subterranean movements (tropisms) can be captured by words, which might explain why her attitude toward things is so much more conventional than that of Robbe-Grillet, who writes:

Perhaps Kafka’s staircases lead elsewhere, but they are there, and we look at them step by step following the details of the banisters and the risers.

This is untrue. First, we do not look at the staircases; we look at a number of words arranged upon a page by a conscious human intelligence which would like us to consider, among a thousand other things, the fact of those staircases. Since a primary concern of the human mind is cause and effect, the reader is bound to speculate upon why those staircases have been shown him; also, since staircases are usually built to connect one man-made level with another, the mind will naturally speculate as to what those two levels are like. Only a far-gone schizophrenic (or an LSD tripper) would find entirely absorbing the description of a banister.

Perhaps the most naïve aspect of Robbe-Grillet’s theory of fiction is his assumption that words can ever describe with absolute precision anything. At no point does he acknowledge that words are simply fiat for real things; by their nature, words are imprecise and layered with meanings—the signs of things, not the things themselves. Therefore, even if Robbe-Grillet’s goal of achieving a total reality for the world of things was desirable, it would not be possible to do it with language, since the author (that man full of torments and passions) is bound to betray his attitude to the sequence of signs he offered us; he has an “interest” in the matter, or else he would not write. Certainly if he means to reinvent man, then he will want to find a way of defining man through human (yes, psychological) relations as well as through a catalogue of things observed and gestures coolly noted. Wanting to play God, ambition is bound to dictate the order of words, and so the subjective will prevail just as it does in the traditional novel. To follow Robbe-Grillet’s theory to its logical terminus, the only sort of book which might be said to be not a collection of signs of absent things but the actual things themselves would be a collection of ink, paper, cardboard, glue, and typeface, to be assembled or not by the reader-spectator. If this be too heavy a joke, then the ambitious writer must devise a new language which might give the appearance of maintaining the autonomy of things, since the words, new-minted, will possess a minimum of associations of a subjective or anthropomorphic sort. No existing language will be of any use to him, unless it be that of the Trobriand Islanders: those happy people have no words for “why” or “because” for them, things just happen. Needless to say, they do not write novels or speculate on the nature of things.

The philosophic origins of the New Novel can be found (like most things French) in Descartes, whose dualism was the reflection of a split between the subjective and the objective, between the irrational and the rational, between the physical and the metaphysical. In the last century Auguste Comte, accepting this dualism, conceived of a logical empiricism which would emphasize the “purely” objective at the expense of the subjective or metaphysical. An optimist who believed in human progress, Comte saw history as an evolution toward a better society. For him the age of religion and metaphysics ended with the French Revolution. Since that time the human race was living in what he termed “the age of science,” and he was confident that the methods of the positive sciences would enrich and transform human life. At last things were coming into their own. But not until the twentieth century did the methods of science entirely overwhelm the arts of the traditional humanists. To the scientific-minded, all things, including human personality, must in time yield their secrets to orderly experiment. Meanwhile, only that which is verifiable is to be taken seriously, emotive meaning must yield to cognitive meaning. Since the opacity of human character has so far defeated all objective attempts at illumination, the New Novelists prefer, as much as possible, to replace the human with objects closely observed and simple gestures noted but not explained.

In many ways, the New Novel appears to be approaching the “pure” state of music. In fact, there are many like Miss Sontag who look forward to “a kind of total structuring” of the novel, analogous to music. This is an old dream of the novelist. Nearly half a century ago, Joyce wrote (in a letter to his brother), “Why should not a modern literature be as unsparing and as direct as song?” Why not indeed? And again, why? The answer to the second “why” is easy enough. In the age of science, the objective is preferred to the subjective. Since human behavior is notoriously irrational and mysterious, it can be demonstrated only in the most impressionistic and unscientific way; it yields few secrets to objective analysis. Mathematics, on the other hand, is rational and verifiable, and music is a form of mathematics. Therefore, if one were to eliminate as much as possible the human from the novel, one might, through “a kind of total structuring,” come close to the state of mathematics or music—in short, achieve that perfect irreducible artifact Robbe-Grillet dreams of.

The dates of Miss Sarraute’s essays range from 1947 to 1956, those of Robbe-Grillet from 1955 to 1963. To categorize in the French manner, it might be said that their views are particularly representative of the Fifties, a period in which the traditional-minded (among whom they must be counted) still believed it possible to salvage the novel—or anything—by new techniques. With a certain grimness, they experimented. But though some of their books are good (even very good) and some are bad, they did not make a “new” novel, if only because art forms do not evolve—in literature at least—from the top down. Despite Robbe-Grillet’s tendency to self-congratulation (“Although these descriptions—motionless arguments or fragments of scene—have acted on the readers in a satisfactory fashion, the judgment many specialists make of them remains pejorative”), there is not much in what he has so far written that will interest anyone except the specialist. It is, however, a convention of the avant-garde that to be in advance of the majority is to be “right.” But the New Novelists are not in advance of anyone. Their works derive from what they believe to be a need for experiment and the imposition of certain of the methods of science upon the making of novels. Fair enough. Yet in this they resemble everyone, since to have a liking for the new is to be with the dull majority. In the arts, the obviously experimental is almost never denounced because it is new: if anything, our taste-makers tend to be altogether too permissive in the presence of what looks to be an experiment, as anyone who reads New York art criticism knows. There is not much likelihood that Robbe-Grillet will be able to reinvent man as a result of his exercises in prose. Rather he himself is in the process of being reinvented (along with the rest of us) by the new world in which we are living.

At the moment, advance culture scouts are reporting with a certain awe that those men and women who were brought up as television-watchers respond, predictably, to pictures that move and talk but not at all to prose fictions; and though fashion might dictate the presence of an occasional irreducible artifact in a room, no one is about to be reinvented by it. Yet the old avant-garde continues worriedly to putter with form.

Surveying the literary output for 1965, Miss Sontag found it “hard to think of any one book [in English] that exemplifies in a central way the possibilities for enlarging and complicating the forms of prose literature.” This desire to “enlarge” and “complicate” the novel has an air of madness to it. Why not minimize and simplify? One suspects that out of desperation she is picking verbs at random. But then, like so many at present, she has a taste for the random. Referring to William Burroughs’s resolutely random work The Soft Machine, she writes: “In the end, the voices come together and sound what is to my mind the most serious, urgent and original voice in American letters to be heard for many years.” It is, however, the point to Mr. Burroughs’s method that the voices don’t come together: he is essentially a sport who is (blessedly) not serious, not urgent, and original only in the sense that no other American writer has been so relentlessly ill-humored in his send-up of the serious. He is the Grand Guy Grand of American letters. But whether or not Miss Sontag is right or wrong in her analyses of specific works and general trends, there is something old-fashioned and touching in her assumption (shared with the New Novelists) that if only we all try hard enough in a “really serious” way, we can come up with the better novel. This attitude reflects not so much the spirit of art as it does that of Detroit.

No one today can predict what games post-Gutenberg man will want to play. The only certainty is that his mind will work differently from ours; just as ours works differently from that of pre-Gutenberg man, as Miss Frances Yates demonstrated so dramatically in The Art of Memory. Perhaps there will be more Happenings in the future. Perhaps the random will take the place of the calculated. Perhaps the ephemeral will be preferred to the permanent: we stop in time, so why should works of art endure? Also, as the shadow of atomic catastrophe continues to fall across our merry games, the ephemeral will necessarily be valued to the extent it gives pleasure in the present and makes no pretense of having a future life. Since nothing will survive the firewind, the ashes of one thing will be very like those of another, and so what matters excellence?

One interesting result of today’s passion for the immediate and the casual has been the decline, in all the arts, of the idea of technical virtuosity as being in any way desirable. The culture (kitsch as well as camp) enjoys singers who sing no better than the average listener, actors who do not act yet are, in Andy Warhol’s happy phrase, “super-stars,” painters whose effects are too easily achieved, writers whose swift flow of words across the page is not submitted to the rigors of grammar or shaped by conscious thought. There is a general Zen-ish sense of why bother? If a natural fall of pebbles can “say” as much as any shaping of paint on canvas or cutting of stone, why go to the trouble of recording what is there for all to see? In any case, if the world should become, as predicted, a village united by an electronic buzzing, our ideas of what is art will seem as curious to those gregarious villagers as the works of what we used to call the Dark Ages appear to us.

Regardless of what games men in the future will want to play, the matter of fiction seems to be closed. Reading skills—as the educationalists say—continue to decline with each new generation. Novel reading is not a pastime of the young now being educated, nor, for that matter, is it a preoccupation of any but a very few of those who came of age in the last warm years of linear type’s hegemony. It is possible that fashion may from time to time bring back a book or produce a book which arouses something like general interest (Miss Sontag darkly suspects that “the nineteenth-century novel has a much better chance for a comeback than verse drama, the sonnet, or landscape painting”). Yet it is literature itself which seems on the verge of obsolescence, and not so much because the new people will prefer watching to reading as because the language in which books are written has become corrupt from misuse.

In fact, George Steiner believes that there is a definite possibility that “The political inhumanity of the twentieth century and certain elements in the technological mass-society which has followed on the erosion of European bourgeois values have done injury to language….” He even goes so far as to suggest that for now at least silence may be a virtue for the writer—when

language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of its being. The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night.

Although Mr. Steiner does not himself take this romantic position (“I am not saying that writers should stop writing. This would be fatuous”), he does propose silence as a proud alternative for those who have lived at the time of Belsen and of Vietnam, and have witnessed the perversion of so many words by publicists and political clowns. The credibility gap is now an abyss, separating even the most honorable words from their ancient meanings. Fortunately, ways of communication are now changing, and though none of us understands exactly what is happening, language is bound to be affected.

But no matter what happens to language, the novel is not apt to be revived by electronics. The portentous theorizings of the New Novelists are of no more use to us than the self-conscious avant-gardism of those who are forever trying to figure out what the next “really serious” thing will be when it is plain that there is not going to be a next serious thing in the novel. Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.

Encounter
December 1967