The Author on his Art

...This blissful reunion of literature and film is not, as is sometimes supposed, merely the result of an arbitrary preference for the visual, as if the other senses were secondrate...

...it is an epistemological act...

...The relation between the camera eye and the world provides a bemusing and inevitable medium for a metaphysic of immediacybefore anguish on the one hand, and "meaning" on the other...

...When one thinks of the foolish violence encountered by his early novelsThe Erasers, The Voyeur, Jealousy -Robbe-Grillet's even temper, his patient willingness to explain it all over again, provokes immediate respect...

...As the sage of an earlier era of fiction brilliantly remarked, "every style reveals a metaphysic," and For a New Novel is the discourse of a major stylist on such a metaphysic...

...But his book is valuable on two levels...

...In this respect, he resembles a very large number of artists-both in fiction and in films-who develop the priority of perception over meaning and memory...

...But the directness and authority which Robbe-Grillet, as a practicing novelist of the first rank, can give to Barthes' astonishing insights entirely redeems the piece from the charge of popularization...

...And he is quite right to call himself a realist who is concerned with the imitation of experience in terms of the objects that lie outside the self...

...Not many of the ideas in this stunning essay-aside from the specifically self-critical passages-are original with Robbe-Grillet: Most are derived from the remarkable French critic, Roland Barthes, who has found his subject in Robbe-Grillet, as Nietzsche found his in Wagner, and Sartre his in Genet...

...Here are a few examples: "For tragedy involves neither a true acceptance nor a true rejection...

...By far the most ambitious, commanding essay in this book is "Nature, Humanism, and Tragedy," a discussion of metaphor, tragedy, community and selfhood in the light of Robbe-Grillet's own project...

...some is relevant principally to other writers, such as Italo Svevo, Joe Bousquet, and Samuel Beckett...

...It is based on a preoccupation (better, a coolly definitive obsession) with the variety and degrees of immediacy, of immanence...

...Robbe-Grillet's insistence upon novelty neither progressively oneups conventional realism ("Now reality, in reality, is "), nor is it explicitly hortatory, as was the novelty of the Surrealists...

...For a New Novel should be read by anyone seriously interested in the future of art...

...And the book has remained the calm center of that frenzy...

...Reviewed by STEPHEN KOCH Department of English New York State University at Stonybrook Robbe-Grillet's lucid, ascetic essays on fiction, which had been appearing at long intervals since 1953, were published as a collection in French three years ago during a frenzy of confusion, protest, and dismay over the author's own work...

...Although interested in experience before it congeals into significance, Robbe-Grillet is hardly promoting seedy primitiveness, nor is he, in the old-fashioned sense, indulging in Art for Art's Sake...

...The height of the mountain assumes, willy-nilly, a moral value...

...At the same time, this collection has general interest...

...In his novels, an image repeated-a crushed insect, a boy slowly disappearing into the snow, the metrical patches of light left by street-lamps -is not intended to be a pattern (symbolic, intellectual, psychological), but a series of meditations on the richness and subtlety of experiencing attention...

...But perhaps not...

...Despite vast differences in the works involved, Robbe-Grillet undoubtedly deserves his role as spokesman for an extremely important, and very broadly based, modern sensibility...

...I am not a theoretician of the novel,' the master begins...

...And quite apart from the question of direct influence, the more sophisticated and austere films of Godard (The Married Women, Vivre sa Vie, Le Petit Soldat, Alphaville), the movies of Truffaut and, in Italy, of Bertolucci and Antonioni, are concerned with the redefinition and refinement of the sensibility in terms of an elegantly understood object reality...

...Robbe-Grillet is concerned with experience while it is still meaningful in itself, before it has become "significant," a sign pointing beyond itself...

...As everyone knows, the so-called "new novel" has found itself married to film...

...Indeed he is not: He is a theoretician of himself and his own art...

...In addition, Robbe-Grillet has written and directed another film, L'Immortelle, which has not yet appeared in America...

...My] struggle, I shall be told, is precisely the tragic illusion par excellence: if I seek to combat the idea of tragedy, I have already succumbed to it...

...Those who have found his four novels (La Maison de Rendez-Vous is not yet out in English, although it soon will be) difficult, boring, worthless, or all three, may be led to read them again in the exhilarating perspective they deserve...

...The novel, RobbeGrillet insists, explores reality...

...Recent developments in French fiction to which this ingeniously effaced, entirely honest celebrity is so important, have set moving an enormous amount of discussion on every level, much of it by the novelists themselves-notably The Age of Suspicion by Nathalie Sarraute and the essays of Michel Butor...

...What matters is something shared: a certain austere experience of the past...

...Robbe-Grillet collaborated with Alain Resnais on Last Year at Marienbad (as did Marguerite Duras on Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Jean Cayrol on Night and Fog and on the masterpiece of these liaisons, Muriel...

...Acknowledgement of outside objects involves a subtle, liberating chastening of the self-an act of consciousness, of will...

...Nature, Humanism, and Tragedy" is crammed with brilliant ideas: It is not the kind of thing that can be summarized, not to say judged, in a review...

...the heat of the sun becomes the result of an intention...

...It is the sublimation of a difference.' "Lovers of metaphor seek only to impose the idea of a communication...

...In the light of its generalizations, it does not greatly matter that the novels of Jean Cayrol and Michel Butor are quite different from one another and from RobbeGrillet's, or that Godard and Bertolucci make only films, or that one of them is a structuralist and the other not...

...Art for Art's Sake is defined by ecstasy, but ecstasy with its temperature lowered, thinned out by the epicene...

...For a New Novel is the most intelligent piece of artistic selfcriticism I know...

...But two of his general ideasemphasis on visual experience, and the rejection of tragedy-are at the core of the most impressive, productive developments in current European art...

...Some of what Robbe-Grillet says in this book applies only to his own novels...

...and it is so natural to take objects as a refuge perhaps...

...The choice of an analogical vocabulary, however simple, already does something more than account for purely physical data, and what this more is can hardly be ascribed only to the credit of belles-lettres...

...Robbe - Grillet wants a direct, freshened experience of the world...

...And, in that case...

...Drowned in the depth of things, man ultimately no longer even perceives them: his role is limited to experiencing, in their name, totally humanized impressions and desires.' (Italics mine, S.K...

...a certain unsentimental, pristine presentness...

...Like the great realists of the past, however, he understands that true imitation of experience creates experience...

...He has some particularly gratifying things to say about the "Great Writer" created by sentimental criticisman "unconscious monster, irresponsible and fate-ridden, even slightly stupid...