The 'New Novelists' of France:
BREE, GERMAINE
The ‘New Novelists’ of France By Germaine Bree Author, Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time, Andre Gide; Head, Department of Romance and Slavic Languages and Literatures, NYU THE ’50s IN...
...And in the novel too...
...Are we seeing through the eyes of a murderer whose mind, in spite of himself, unconsciously and obsessively revolves around a hidden criminal center...
...Perhaps the closest to the jig-saw puzzle technique is Robbe-Grillet and his “new realism...
...Proust and Dostoyevsky in the case of Sarraute...
...For the reader, Butor’s novels may seem slow, endlessly repetitive...
...A NOVEL BY Robbe-Grillet, therefore, is composed of groups of recurrent, fragmentary images...
...But it is paradoxical...
...They put a problem of detection to the reader, leaving it up to him to draw a story from the material presented...
...In The Age of Suspicion she defined her fictional realm...
...But beyond this, it is almost impossible to speak of the “new” novelist as a whole: There are marked differences in range, mood and technique between them...
...In his attempt at a complete factual elucidation of a shifting reality, the central character uncovers layer upon layer of relationships, feelings, moods, patterns of behavior...
...He was not, as one might suppose, appealing merely to that kind moral disposition in the reader, although by inference the appeal is not absent...
...First, the showing itself is quite impressive, when we consider that the “new novelists” of today were virtually unknown five years ago, Since 1953, the date of his first novel, Les Gommes (Erasers), Robbe-Grillet has published three widely discussed novels: The Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957) and In The Labyrinth (1959...
...First, he has emptied his world of any preconceived meaning...
...Mathias has planned a careful full-day prospection of the whole island, leaving not a minute unaccounted for: so much space, so many hours, so many watches...
...Most of the techniques used by the new novel seem to him ingenious devices, “seductive” new puzzles proposed to the intelligent reader and, indeed, some of the new novelists deliberately draw from the detective story or science fiction...
...In fact, a whole critical literature has already developed around the “new” novel...
...No sharp noise could leave a group of faces so motionless...
...Butor and Simon, through sometimes tedious and repetitive techniques, attempt to communicate a total experience of reality...
...It is he who suggests the possibility that there are obscure hidden forces at work, a world to be explored...
...Each of them brings his own views on such matters, but each one also claims certain antecedents: Flaubert in the case of Robbe-Grillet: Proust, Joyce and Faulkner in the case of Butor...
...Satire is implicit in this view of the psychological medium in which the characters move as social beings, and which determines infinitesimal but constant psychological variations, vibrations, retractions and aggresssions, and a “subconversation” which never ceases...
...the Prix Medicis for Claude Ollier’s Mise en Scene (1959...
...Naturally, any opinion concerning their work is bound to be provisional...
...In each of his novels to date, the central character in some fashion atempts to organize his “time-schedule,” his relation with the events, places and people among whom he lives...
...Each object on which Mathias’ eyes rest, meticulously, carefully, oppressively described, reveals something beyond itself in relation to Mathias, yet it is not symbolic and what it reveals is a matter of speculation...
...In the sense that most of these novelists are attempting to break with certain conventions of the novel, the term “anti-novelists” might apply...
...Unlike the authors of detective stories or science fiction, however, the French novelists do not usually suggest solutions...
...Through modifications brought about by new associations, the pattern of description suggests the presence of a mind into which the reader must penetrate, a mind carrying its own significant space and time pattern cut according to its own purpose...
...Every line of hers is precious...
...Alain Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution in the novel more radical than Romanticism and Naturalism were in their time...
...made her actual debut in 1954 with Martereau...
...The people she chooses to observe are townspeople, usually fairly prosperous, living like shell fish in the nooks and crannies of their city apartments, intent on projects that are seen as infinitesimal and yet become the source of innumerable hidden tensions: an exchange of apartments, buying a house, etc...
...Publicity alone cannot explain the overwhelming interest the “new novelists” have aroused...
...And in that gap a sinister design takes shape: the string, the girl, the nails, the gull are all involved...
...From this opening we move to the figure of Mathias on the deck of a ship about to dock at the island...
...Of these four novelists, two— Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute—seem so far to have drastically and deliberately limited the scope of the novel, to explore better its possibilities of renewal in certain defined areas...
...has just published his fourth, Degres (1960...
...Butor, whose first novel...
...Mathias’ eyes fall on certain objects: “a thin hemp of cord in perfect condition, carefully rolled into a figure eight with a few extra turns wound around the middle...
...We find it impossible to organize in our consciousness all the information that reaches it...
...In his volume of essays, The New Literature, Claude Mauriac made quite startling claims for Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute...
...In the past...
...The present has its sources in a faraway past...
...Perhaps most articulate among these are the novelists, methodical experimenters—and the exponents of their experiments— with new structures, new relations, new forms of fiction...
...Unlike their predecessors— Malraux, Sartre, Camus and even Beckett—the “new novelists” are, they claim, just novelists: They do not propound a metaphysical view of the world, nor do they adhere to any explicit “psychology” or to a common theory as to the nature of the fictional world...
...a gray gull...
...A husband is watching his wife...
...The fascination of Robbe-Grillet’s novels, within these limits, comes from the powerful use he makes of a clear, cold language whose variations in pattern, pace and mood suggest musical structures...
...The most prolific among the “new novelists,” and the least known in America, is Robert Pinget...
...Proust and Dostoyevsky, she claimed, have left little for the novelist to do in the way of psychological description and creation of character...
...Sarraute, whose Tropismes passed unnoticed in 1939...
...The positive elements [in our novels] are particular to each one of us...
...Sartre, who wrote the preface to Sarraute’s Portrait of a Man Unknown (1956), called it an “anti-novel...
...If so, when...
...There was no more reaction—no further exclamation—than there had been at first...
...But where their probing ends, Sarraute’s begins...
...To these four names others can be added to whom the label “new” does not altogether apply: Beckett, for example, one of the masters of the “new novel,” writers like Claude Simon, whose first two novels appeared in 1946-47, and Marguerite Duras, who belongs to the same generation as Camus...
...The world is not absurd, nor are objects, natural or man-made, symbolical a priori...
...More cautious...
...Among the “new novelists,” three at least—Butor, Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute—are translated almost as soon as they are published...
...For each one of his tales Robbe-Grillet attempts to create a unique time and space for privileged objects—human, man-made and natural—which belong to this time-space unit exclusively...
...only once does his shadow fall across the threshold...
...His story is, in fact, implicit in the way his senses cut out certain fragments of the world, the way he sees or hears certain things only, but these over and over again in imagination or memory...
...The story opens with a descriptive passage: “It was as if no one had heard...
...A pattern of objects is forming, all somehow connected, related in time and space, but why...
...She is the observer of the minute modifications in the psychological tissue of our social life as they appear in their most elementary forms before they reach the consciousness of the individual involved...
...Now the shadow of the column— the column which supports the southwest corner of the roof—divides the corresponding corner of the veranda into two equal parts . . . . Now A has come into the bedroom by the inside door opening into the central hallway . . . . Now the shadow of the column—the column which supports the southwest corner of the roof— lengthens across the flagstones of the part of this part of the veranda . . . .” At each moment the images, always fragmentary, and the fragmentary snatches of conversation shift and change as time goes by, and the novel revolves closer to its dark and absent center—murder, a murder desired, imagined or carried out, who knows...
...And if a certain number of novelists can be considered as forming a group, it is much more by their negative elements or by their refusal in the face of the traditional novel,” Robbe-Grillet has remarked...
...not one feature of one face had ever trembled . . . .” Clearly there is a hiatus between the sound of the whistle and the motionless faces...
...In The Voyeur there is a central figure...
...From its first application to the works of Robbe-Grillet, Butor and Sarraute, the label “new” has come to cover a very diverse group of writers who have only two characetristics in common: They were unknown before 1955, and they have methodically set out to orient the novel in new directions...
...The basic “cell” observed is the family— mother, father, child—and the observer eagerly notes all the inner changes of emotional equilibrium among them...
...Or the superimposition of past memory and present perception...
...All are thoroughly aware that behind them lies both a long tradition of novel writing and, most emphatically and recently, Sartre and his massive and theoretical ontology: Being and Nothingness...
...The traditional techniques of narrative are unable to integrate all the new relations which have evolved...
...the individual, in his insignificant surface life with his insignificant tasks, finds other beings deep within him—eventually one, strong, relentless, timeless being who directs the others through the complex maze of events...
...In The Voyeur for example, Mathias, a salesman, returns to the island of his birth to sell watches...
...Mathias...
...Passage de Milan (Passage Through Milan), came out in 1954...
...His last two novels, The Wind and The Grass, developing in great, interminable Faulknerian paragraphs, attempt to grasp, through the medium of a story-pretext, the total flow of existence as it is reflected through characters immersed in life as in an ocean...
...On the banana plantation where the husband lives with his wife, A, he watches A and Franck, their neighbor, and the same fragments of scenes come up over and over again...
...Head, Department of Romance and Slavic Languages and Literatures, NYU THE ’50s IN FRANCE have produced a deliberately independent group of writers—the “new” novelists, poets, playwrights...
...As he himself puts it, the world is “there” and all meanings come afterwards and are irrelevant...
...He was referring to the well-known jeu de patience, jig-saw puzzle...
...He is, in a sense, the author’s emissary, the mediator through whom the reader enters into Butor’s narrative, a consciousness both involved and transcendent...
...They feel no hesitation about fully explaining their aims and methods in a number of articles and interviews which the avant-garde Evergreen Review frequently reproduces...
...R. N. Alberes, a well-known critic, has evaluated the new novel in an essay entitled “Patience...
...Besides Tropismes, she has produced three novels, as well as a long essay on fiction called The Age of Suspicion (1956...
...Archetypal designs appear and eventually comes the revelation of a unifying inner drive...
...When these modulations disappear under the weight of a meticulous, endless description of places and objects, as in In the Labyrinth, the reader becomes too clearly aware that Robbe-Grillet is setting and solving purely technical problems: Given an empty room, a blizzard, a soldier, a shoe-box, a lamp post, how can a pattern be evolved, a story implied...
...Jealousy, as we all know, is an obsessive passion which feeds on every shred of evidence it can seize, past or present, and even projects its fears into the future...
...The whistle blew again—a shrill, prolonged noise followed by three short blasts of ear-splitting violence: a violence without purpose that remained without effect...
...The human being, the natural hero of any novel, does not therefore fit into a decor made for him...
...Butor chooses very simple everyday contemporary characters: a bank clerk, a sales representative, a teacher in a lycee...
...in Jealousy the figure disappears...
...His “new realism” is systematically oriented toward the creation of narrative forms which might reveal the many as yet unexplored relations which link contemporary human beings with others and with the world around them, both in time past, present and future and in space: “The world in which we are living is changing rapidly...
...Into the description an unexpected element has been injected, a time factor, characteristic only of human consciousness...
...The Planetarium, her latest novel, shows by its very title that her perspectives are those of an observer looking at human beings as though they were constellations in a planetarium...
...But there is a slip, there is a gap somewhere in this careful plan...
...Nathalie Sarraute’s novels are completely different in tone and atmosphere...
...The description, careful though it is, troubles our sense of logic...
...The evidence is of rape and murder, but were the rape and murder committed...
...To Sarraute he attributes “genius,” adding: “There are few living authors whom I admire so much...
...So far less well-known than these three writers, and more difficult at first to understand, Claude Simon is building a fictional world of larger dimensions...
...Still studiedly concerted and experimental in its approach, extremely diverse in the methods and techniques with which it works, the “new” novel in France is well worth watching...
...But there is always slight modification in the patterns of the scenes and it belies the continued use of the present tense...
...The terms “new novel,” “new realism,” “blank” novel, “ante-” or “anti-” novel are becoming as familiar as the word “existentialism...
...With each successive novel, Sarraute has enlarged the scope of her explorations within the limits of this pre-psychological psychology, but without ridding her writing of an excessive febrility in style which seems unwarranted and tiresome...
...The world “refuses to yield to our habits of perception and order...
...The novel itself is an object, structured like the labyrinth...
...Is the image then perhaps a memory...
...a little girl of eight gravely staring at him...
...We never see him...
...Butor therefore “methodically” experiments with new novel forms whose power of “interpreting” and integrating this information might be adequate to the total experience: “Form being a principal of choice, new forms will reveal new phenomena in our real experience, new connections...
...Michel Butor’s world is far more human than Robbe-Grillet’s...
...There is a marked desire to renew the novel, but at this experimental stage each novelist is going in his own direction...
...But they are strongly structured, often according to patterns suggested by musical compositions, and they are conceived and written with the complete honesty of a man who is personally and deeply involved in a search for unity and truth...
...Born only yesterday, “new” novels have gained a number of literary prizes: the Prix des Critiques for Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur (1955) ; the Prix Theophraste Renaudot for Michel Butor’s Change of Heart (1957...
...his nails “exaggeratedly pointed...
...The faces are seen as if in a snapshot...
...or now...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 20
