The Austerities of the New Novel
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING The Austerities of the New Novel By Stanley Edgar Hyman I am perhaps not the best audience for the French "new novel." I do not believe that the traditional novel is dead, or...
...The narrator is a banana planter on a Caribbean island, and the novel consists of his observations of his wife A. .. and a neighboring planter named Franck with whom the narrator believes her to be having an affair...
...No subtlety of characterization is possible, since only familiar shapes are recognizable in these murky waters: Detective confronts Victim in The Erasers...
...A consequence of this camera-eye restriction, and the last of these odd principles, is: uncertainty not omniscience...
...It is The Erasers (Grove Press, 256 pp., $4.95...
...There are a few figures of speech in these novels, but they seem to be oversights, since Robbe-Grillet aims to replace all figuration with exact mensuration...
...so that he may work against the gang, the government announces that he is dead...
...In the Labyrinth tells of a demobilized soldier come to a provincial city in winter to deliver, to a man who is to meet him on a street corner, a box containing a dead soldier's belongings...
...The other two austerities seem to have been inaugurated after The Erasers...
...This sequence is nowhere given in the book...
...Worst of all, the results quickly become monotonous and boring...
...I can best express them in the form of slogans...
...I regard these novels as serious experiments and Robbe-Grillet as a very clever man...
...He has inherited the box, and he may have (or he may not have) inherited the soldier's mission...
...and so on...
...when a door is open a few inches her son appears as a "vertical strip" of a boy...
...Trivialization seems inevitable in the method: with the devotion of a 19th-century Russian novelist describing the ice breaking up on the Neva in April, Robbe-Grillet describes an ice cube melting in Franck's drink...
...The husband can try to reconstruct a remark from the situation, and he will give alternative possibilities if he has not heard a remark clearly, but he has (and we have) no access to what goes on out of his sight and hearing...
...The ninth of these, an economist named Daniel Dupont, escapes with an arm wound...
...This is Robbe-Grillet's first novel, originally published in 1953...
...The Erasers is not easy to synopsize...
...A detective named Wallas, whose odd habit is buying erasers, is sent from Paris to investigate Dupont's murder...
...We learn, of the soldier in In the Labyrinth: "It suddenly seems very important to make an exact inventory of the room...
...Thus A...
...On that dangerously open-minded principle I tackled the latest novel to be published in this country by the film's author, Alain Robbe-Grillet...
...in my opinion they are failed experiments of limited value, and Robbe-Grillet has been sadly misled by his cleverness...
...A band of terrorists in a French town on the Channel coast have taken to killing a public figure every evening at 7:30...
...It is full of references to Sophocles' Oedipus the King: its epigraph is the Chorus' moral to Oedipus, "Time that sees all has found you out against your will...
...A prefatory note to In the Labyrinth insists that the story "is subject to no allegorical interpretation...
...A woman who befriends the soldier is described only when she comes into the light...
...Robbe-Grillet has published two manifestoes for his practices in La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Francoise: "Une voie pour le roman futur" (July 1956), and "Nature, humanisme et tragedie" (October 1958...
...one day Franck is expected for lunch but does not appear...
...From such a chronology it is possible to suspect that Franck has been killed by the jealous narrator, but Robbe-Grillet nowhere says so, and Franck may equally have been killed by his jealous wife, or may have been kept from coming to lunch by a nasty sniffle...
...that the omnipresent and omniscient author, with his traditional characters and plot, has been replaced by observers and objects...
...The revolution lies in four curious austerities which he imposes on the novelist...
...he gets wounded by an enemy patrol, and he soon dies, his package undelivered...
...Nevertheless, one ought to give the new and experimental a fair hearing...
...that he objects to metaphor as sentimentalizing the material universe, which should only be quantified...
...brushing her hair is described only to the extent that the narrator can see her, and when she steps away from the window the description stops (Robbe-Grillet even uses the theatrical term "sight-lines" for this...
...In In the Labyrinth, the soldier tells us that a boy in a cafe is "not the same as the one" he met earlier...
...The novel is a curious tour de force, powerful and disturbing but limited and monotonous...
...Jealousy is very different...
...But Robbe-Grillet aspires to much more...
...Thus when Wallas looks into a store window we are told not the contents of his mind but the contents of the window...
...It is so important that it replaces psychology...
...In his view, he is not narrowing the novel but enlarging it, with the resources of musical form (a long description of a native song in Jealousy is clearly an esthetic for the novel), the abstraction of modern painting, and the immediacy of film...
...Franck kills a centipede on the wall, leaving a stain...
...He misses the meeting and for several days-during which time the enemy occupies the city-he wanders the streets looking for someone to whom to deliver the box...
...The whole fascinating world of the mind is made off-limits to the novelist, along with metaphor's recognition of similarity in dissimilarity, which Aristotle saw as a mark of genius...
...I do think that there are certain gains...
...An amusing idea, one thinks: the detective murdering the corpse...
...I have now read all of them but The Voyeur...
...Robbe-Grillot's revolution does not lie in his subject matter, which from Fated Parricide to Quest is the traditional material of literature, or in his uses of form, which include conventional symbolism (the erasers, the centipede, the box), and a great deal of repetition with variation...
...Franck and A. . . drive to town for a day's shopping and have to stay overnight when the car breaks down...
...A few simple events recur endlessly: Franck visits for drinks or meals...
...We must take Robbe-Grillet's word that these events are not meant to have any larger meaning, that they stand for nothing beyond themselves...
...Robbe-Grillet's freedom from the conventions of the novel is the freedom of deprivation...
...In its restriction for most of its length to the soldier's painful and delirious perceptions, or the doctor's reconstruction of them, In the Labyrinth is indescribably tedious...
...But the losses are massive...
...All have been translated by Richard Howard, and published in this country by Grove...
...Thus Robbe-Grillet's revolution is in part technical, to produce a modem form for the novel, and in part philosophical, to come closer to the truth of our experience...
...his other novels, with their dates of publication in France, are The Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957), and In the Labyrinth (1959...
...when Wallas walks in a cold wind we are not given his emotions but the shrinkage of the skin on his face...
...later the narrator tells us that it probably was the same boy, "despite slight contradictions...
...These make clear that he is against the use of psychology because visual experiences give a truer account of inner reality...
...while they are away the narrator erases most of the centipede stain...
...He is half-frozen, exhausted and feverish...
...the soldier of In the Labyrinth can be allowed no shred of individuality...
...As the result of a wild series of coincidences, among them Wallas' physical resemblance to one of the killers, Dupont and Wallas manage to confront each other with pistols in Dupont's house at 7: 30 the next night, and Wallas shoots Dupont dead...
...The first is: things not thoughts...
...Why does Robbe-Grillet impose these limitations on his fiction...
...it has been constructed for me by an ingenious puzzle-loving lady of my household, dating events by whether the centipede stain is absent, present, or faintly present on the wall...
...The novel hints strongly that, unknown to either, Wallas is Dupont's illegitimate son...
...we have no way of knowing which is true...
...a drunk in a cafe plays variations on the Sphinx's riddle...
...Perhaps even a commentary on the paradoxes of identification, like Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday...
...A second principle is: measurements not metaphors...
...Thus Wallas walks the town, not lonely as a cloud, but "a half second for each step, a step and a half for each yard, eighty yards a minute...
...Thus A...
...All this suggests that The Erasers is Robbe-Grillet's perfectly serious version of the Oedipus story, and that all the roman policier contrivance is his version of the power of fate...
...Philosophically, a world of limited and distorted sense perceptions is undoubtedly truer to our present sense of experience than a solid world surely known...
...is "probably" holding a letter because the narrator cannot see clearly, Franck is "probably" thanking her for a drink because the narrator cannot hear him...
...the trio in Jealousy are the stock triangle of harle-quinade and French bedroom farce...
...After his death the narrator identifies himself as a retired doctor who treated the soldier...
...But in themselves they are trivial and tedious, so that finally they have no interest for us...
...It is the least novel I have ever read...
...I found the film Last Year at Marienbad so slow and boring that I walked out...
...Technically, these methods can produce a smoldering intensity, as in Jealousy...
...he and A. .. discuss a novel set in Africa...
...One is: spatial limitation not omnipresence...
...It binds the novelist with the tightest new constraints, until he cannot even perform his primary function, which is to be interesting...
...We never learn the feelings of the lovers in Jealousy, if indeed they are lovers, but we are invariably told the location of their chairs, and the angle at which the chairs are set...
...I do not believe that the traditional novel is dead, or that the psychological novel is outmoded, or that literature needs-or in fact could endure-a modern revolution like those in art and music...
...It is more like a fugue or a villaneIle, or like a pioneer surrealist movie, than it is like a work of fiction...
Vol. 48 • January 1965 • No. 1
