Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  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’ 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’ 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 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, Contrad, 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’ 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.”