Love and 'the Novel that Isn't':
FELLOWS, OTIS
Love and 'the Novel that Isn't' Paths of Love. By Vercors. Putnam. 220 pp. $4.00. Fête. By Roger Vailland. Knopf. 248 pp. $3.95. Passing Time. By Michel Butor. Simon and Shuster. 310 pp....
...Vailland's American publisher advertises a French aphorism to the effect that here is revealed the French concept of love...
...Like his colleagues, he too reduces plot to a minimum...
...Because of his quiet courage, unfailing humanism and sincere love of country, and also on account of his hauntingly sensitive little classic, the clandestinely published Silence of the Sea, Vercors emerged from the Resistance late in 1944 to be received with admiration, affection and respect by a liberated people...
...Fête, his most recent novel, is markedly inferior to the earlier, brilliant tour de force, The Law...
...In these scenes may well lie the great merit of the novel: Vailland has created the illusion of reality...
...innocence or naïveté, or both, slowly awaken to the horror, degradation and pathos of the guiltridden and obsessed...
...Some of its latter-day divergencies are strikingly apparent in the works of three contemporarv French writers already known on this side of the Atlantic: Vercors (Jean Bruller), Roger Vailland and Michel Butor...
...Life for him is a bit of a bore alleviated by good food, a spasmodic interest in wild orchids, sports cars, the frequent whiskies his complaisant wife pours for him and, most of all, the "fêtes" of extramarital love—the most inspiring and, he confesses, "the most fiery of all fêtes...
...As the diary builds up, the sentences become longer and longer and the writer's imagination spills over the entries while the reader, without quite knowing why, finds himself under a spell that draws him on to the end...
...Duc is in a rut from the opening pages of the book, and it is obvious that he will not be able to get on with his new novel—a novel within a novel, a common enough practice among French writers—until he has gone to bed with the 26-year-old wife of a part-time friend and poet, JeanMarc...
...He is also one of today's most promising and most authentically original novelists...
...Reviewed by Otis Fellows Professor of French Literature, Columbia University The tradition of the French novel, stemming as it does from the medieval romance, is a long and extremely varied one...
...Butor's A Change of Heart and the earlier but just recently translated Passing Time are sufficient proof of his talent...
...indeed, Vailland has long recognized his debt to those he considers the great debunkers of sentimental love: Choderlos de Laclos, the Marquis de Sade and Stendhal...
...he emphasizes repetition of phrase, word and scene...
...he strives to convince the reader that paragraphs akin to dictionary definitions project reality...
...Thus, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and others, Vailland now selfconsciously takes his place among France's "new" novelists...
...and to seek physical pleasure, which is the greatest of all delights...
...In Fête, we are asked to believe that the main character, Due, is a highly intelligent man and an exceptionally gifted writer...
...But Due does know what he wants: to avoid physical pain, which is the greatest of misfortunes...
...In his search for the truth, Jacques finds there are many voids to fill and he utilizes thousands of details over and over again much as Seurat employed pointillism to build up forms on his canvases...
...Meanwhile the reader is able to pass some two or three weekends either in an eminent writer's country house or in a hotel bedroom listening to recordings of Bach or Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, when those present are not eating, sleeping, concentrating on sex relations or listening to the host's wise observations on mysticism, ancient history, the poetry of Alfred de Vigny and the tubers of the rare orchis hi folia...
...Judged in the company of Vailland and Butor, however, he is bound to appear—with his conventional forms and techniques, intricate plots and extravagant denouements—superannuated to the avant-garde reader...
...Cynical," however, is accurate...
...The novelettes have serious flaws...
...Fortunately there are better ones—Michel Butor, for example...
...Of the three writers under discussion, Butor alone has demonstrated that fiction is an advanced form of art, and of these recently translated works, only Passing Time can be said to have the seeds of greatness...
...As far as love is concerned, Vailland is true to the idea advanced in all his previous work—that physical love is the greatest of all delights and that love in any other form is so much hogwash...
...No more masks, no more plots," the writer-protagonist declares...
...He has done it so convincingly that one feels he is in the company of real personages—though they are an insufferable lot, to be sure...
...It comes as no surprise that the "new novel" Due will finally write is the one we ourselves have just been reading...
...Despite his youth-—he was horn in 1927—he is a recognized leader among those seeking new forms of expression in French fiction...
...One endless sentence begins: "Thus the sequence of former days is only restored to us through a whole host of other days, constantly changing, and every event calls up an echo from other, earlier events which caused it or explain it, or correspond to it, every monument, every object, every image sending us back to other periods which we must reawaken in order to recover the lost secret of their power for good or evil, other periods...
...Thus it is that Vailland emerges as a fair representative of the "new" school...
...But Jacques' canvas is time in all its disconcerting mobility, present time that is continually curling back upon the past, and past time that is incessantly overlapping the present...
...Passing Time is a diary account of a young Frenchman's coming to grips with a huge British industrial city, its mirages, its decay, its exudations and its gloomy unrest, its everchanging reality...
...he insists upon the minute descriptive detail which may or may not illuminate...
...Successfully chameleon-like, for twenty years he has been alert to assume the political, intellectual and aesthetic coloring of the French avant-garde...
...Now, some 16 years and several books later, the English-reading public is offered two novelettes, December's Freedom and Monsieur Prousthe, under the mildly pretentious composite title of Paths of Love...
...In the main, Fête adheres to the tenets of the movement, and loudly proclaims the fact...
...yet Vercors, as in the past, is a master of the underplayed scene, the ironic twist, the poignant touch...
...The novel affords little evidence of one or the other...
...Both stories stress the unusual situation and the unexpected unfolding of events...
...Clearly, the author wishes to be known as a part of the "new wave" in French fiction and a member in good standing of what Sartre has designated the "antinovel" school...
...the blurb on the dust jacket states that the book is "surprising, witty and shockingly cynical.' Actually, it is as surprising and as witty as a day spent in a Chicago abattoir...
...The idea is not a new one...
...Fine," says his wife, "we are entering into the season of the novel that isn't...
...The characters are out of the ordinary but believable and intensely human, whatever their shortcomings and aberrations...
...Roger Vailland represents something else again...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 14
