Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  For Robbe-Grillet, the problem of the novel is—obviously—the problem of man in relation to his environment, a relationship which he believes has changed radically in the last fifty years. In the past, man attempted to personalize the universe. In prose, this is revealed by metaphor: “majestic peaks,” “huddled villages,” “pitiless sun.” “These anthropomorphic analogies are repeated too insistently, too coherently, not to reveal an entire metaphysical system.” And he attacks what he holds to be the humanistic view: “On the pretext that man can achieve only a subjective knowledge of the world, humanism decides to elect man the justification of everything.” In fact, he believes that humanists will go so far as to maintain that “it is not enough to show man where he is: it must further be proclaimed that man is everywhere.” Quite shrewdly he observes: “If I say ‘the world is man,’ I shall always gain absolution; while if I say things are things, and man is only man, I am immediately charged with a crime against humanity.”

  It is this desire to remove the falsely human from the nature of things that is at the basis of Robbe-Grillet’s theory. He is arguing not so much against what Ruskin called “the pathetic fallacy,” as against our race’s tendency to console itself by making human what is plainly nonhuman. To those who accuse him of trying to dehumanize the novel, he replies that since any book is written by a man “animated by torments and passion,” it cannot help but be human. Nevertheless, “suppose the eyes of this man rest on things without indulgence, insistently: he sees them but he refuses to appropriate them.” Finally, “man looks at the world but the world does not look back at him, and so, if he rejects communion, he also rejects tragedy.” Inconsistently, he later quotes with admiration Joé Bousquet’s “We watch things pass by in order to forget that they are watching us die.”

  Do those things watch or not? At times Miss Sarraute writes as if she thought they did. Her Tropisms are full of things invested with human response (“The crouched houses standing watch all along the gray streets”), but then she is not so strict as Robbe-Grillet in her apprehension of reality. She will accept “those analogies which are limited to the instinctive irresistible nature of the movements…produced in us by the presence of others, or by objects from the outside world.” For Robbe-Grillet, however, “All analogies are dangerous.”

  Man’s consciousness has now been separated from his environment. He lives in a perpetual present. He possesses memory but it is not chronological. Therefore the best that the writer can hope to do is to impart a precise sense of man’s being in the present. To achieve this immediacy, Miss Sarraute favors “some precise dramatic action shown in slow motion”; a world in which “time was no longer the time of real life but of a hugely amplified present.” While Robbe-Grillet, in commenting upon his film Last Year at Marienbad, declares:

  The Universe in which the entire film occurs is, characteristically, in a perpetual present which makes all recourse to memory impossible. This is a world without a past, a world which is self-sufficient at every moment and which obliterates itself as it proceeds.

  To him, the film is a ninety-minute fact without antecedents. “The only important ‘character’ is the spectator. In his mind unfolds the whole story which is precisely imagined by him.” The verb “imagine” is of course incorrect, while the adverb means nothing. The spectator is not imagining the film; he is watching a creation which was made in a precise historic past by a writer, a director, actors, cameramen, etc. Yet to have the spectator or reader involve himself directly and temporally in the act of creation continues to be Robbe-Grillet’s goal. He wants “a present which constantly invents itself” with “the reader’s creative assistance,” participating “in a creation, to invent in his turn the work—and the world—and thus to learn to invent his own life.” This is most ambitious. But the ingredients of the formula keep varying. For instance, in praising Raymond Roussel, Robbe-Grillet admires the author’s “investigation which destroys, in the writing itself, its own object.” Elsewhere: “The work must seem necessary but necessary for nothing; its architecture is without use; its strength is untried.” And again: “The genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of speaking. He must create a world but starting from nothing, from the dust….” It would not seem to be possible, on the one hand, to invent a world that would cause the reader to “invent his own life” while, on the other hand, the world in question is being destroyed as it is being created. Perhaps he means for the reader to turn to dust, gradually, page by page: not the worst of solutions.

  No doubt there are those who regard the contradictions in Robbe-Grillet’s critical writing as the point to them—rather in the way that the boredom of certain plays or the incompetence of certain pictures are, we are assured, their achievement. Yet it is worrisome to be told that a man can create a world from nothing when that is the one thing he cannot begin to do, simply because, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot dispose of himself. Even if what he writes is no more than nouns and adjectives, who and what he is will subconsciously dictate order. Nothing human is random and it is nonsense to say:

  Art is based on no truth that exists before it; and one may say that it expresses nothing but itself. It creates its own equilibrium and its own meaning. It stands all by itself…or else it falls.

  Which reminds us of Professor Herzog’s plaintive response to the philosophic proposition that modern man at a given moment fell into the quotidian: so where was he standing before the fall? In any case, how can something unique, in Robbe-Grillet’s sense, rise or fall or be anything except itself? As for reflecting “no truth that existed before it,” this is not possible. The fact that the author is a man “filled with torments and passion” means that all sorts of “truths” are going to occur in the course of the writing. The act of composing prose is a demonstration not only of human will but of desire to reflect truth—particularly if one’s instinct is messianic, and Robbe-Grillet is very much in that tradition. Not only does he want man “to invent his own life” (by reading Robbe-Grillet), but he proposes that today’s art is “a way of living in the present world, and of participating in the permanent creation of tomorrow’s world.” It also seems odd that a theory of the novel which demands total existence in a self-devouring present should be concerned at all with the idea of future time since man exists, demonstrably, only in the present—the future tense is a human conceit, on the order of “majestic peaks.” As for the use of the adjective “permanent,” one suspects that rhetoric, not thought, forced this unfortunate word from the author’s unconscious mind.

  The ideal work, according to Robbe-Grillet, is

  A text both “dense and irreducible”; so perfect that it does not seem “to have touched,” an object so perfect that it would obliterate our tracks….Do we not recognize here the highest ambition of every writer?

  Further, the only meaning for the novel is the invention of the world. “In dreams, in memory, as in the sense of sight, our imagination is the organizing force of our life, of our world. Each man, in his turn, must reinvent the things around him.” Yet, referring to things, he writes a few pages later,

  They refer to no other world. They are the sign of nothing but themselves. And the only contact man can make with them is to imagine them.

  But how is one to be loyal to the actual fact of things if they must be reinvented? Either they are there or they are not. In any case, by filtering them through the imagination (reinvention), true objectivity is lost, as he himself admits in a further snarling of his argument: “Objectivity in the ordinary sense of the word—total impersonality of observation—is all too obviously an illusion. But freedom of observation should be possible and yet it is not”—because a “continuous fringe of culture (psychology, ethics, metaphysics, etc.) is added to things, giving them a less alien aspect.” But he believes that “humanizing” can be kept to a minimum, if we try “to construct a world both more solid and more immediate. Let it be first of all by th
eir presence that objects and gestures establish themselves and let this presence continue to prevail over the subjective.” Consequently, the task of the New Novel is nothing less than to seek

  new forms for the novel…forms capable of expressing (or of creating) new relations between man and the world, to all those who have determined to invent the novel, in other words, to invent man. Such writers know that the systematic repetition of the forms of the past is not only absurd and futile, but that it can even become harmful: blinding us to our real situation in the world today, it keeps us, ultimately, from constructing the world and man of tomorrow.

  With the change of a noun or two, this could easily be the coda of an address on American foreign policy, delivered by Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to the ADA.

  Like Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute regards Camus’ The Stranger as a point of departure. She sees the book’s immediate predecessors as “The promising art of the cinema” and “the wholesome simplicity of the new American novel.” Incidentally, she is quite amusing when she describes just what the effect of these “wholesome” novels was upon the French during the years immediately after the war:

  By transporting the French reader into a foreign universe in which he had no foothold, [they] lulled his wariness, aroused in him the kind of credulous curiosity that travel books inspire, and gave him a delightful impression of escape into an unknown world.

  It is reassuring to learn that these works were not regarded with any great seriousness by the French and that Horace McCoy was not finally the master they once hailed him. Apparently the American novel was simply a vigorous tonic for an old literature gone stale. Miss Sarraute is, however, sincerely admiring of Faulkner’s ability to involve the reader in his own world. To her the most necessary thing of all is “to dispossess the reader and entice him, at all costs, into the author’s territory. To achieve this the device that consists in referring to the leading characters as T constitutes a means.” The use of the first person seems to her to be the emblem of modern art. (“Since Impressionism all pictures have been painted in the first person.”) And so, just as photography drove painters away from representing nature (ending such ancient arts as that of the miniaturist and the maker of portrait busts), the cinema “garners and perfects what is left of it by the novel.” The novel must now go where the camera may not follow. In this new country the reader has been aided by such modern writers as Proust and Joyce; they have so awakened his sensibilities that he is now able to respond to what is beneath the interior monologue, that “immense profusion of sensations, images, sentiments, memories, impulses, little larval actions that no inner language can convey.” For her, emphasis falls upon what she calls the sub-conversation, that which is sensed and not said, the hidden counterpoint to the stated theme (obviously a very difficult thing to suggest, much less write, since “no inner language can convey it”).

  “Bosquet’s universe—ours—is a universe of signs,” writes Robbe-Grillet. “Everything in it is a sign; and not the sign of something else, something more perfect, situated out of reach, but a sign of itself, of that reality which asks only to be revealed.” This answer to Baudelaire’s The Salon of 1859 is reasonable (although it is anthropomorphic to suggest that reality asks to be revealed). Robbe-Grillet is equally reasonable in his desire for things to be shown, as much as possible, as they are.

  In the future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be there before being something; and they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterably, eternally present, mocking their own “meaning,” that meaning which vainly tries to reduce them to the role of precarious tools, etc.

  One agrees with him that the integrity of the nonhuman world should be honored. But what does he mean (that proscribed verb!) when he says that the objects will be there, after meaning has attempted to rape them? Does he mean that they will still exist on the page, in some way inviolate in their thing-ness? If he does, surely he is mistaken. What exists on the page is ink; or, if one wishes to give the ink designs their agreed-upon human meaning, letters have been formed to make words in order to suggest things not present. What is on the page are not real things but their word-shadows. Yet even if the things were there, it is most unlikely that they would be so human as to “mock their own meaning.” In an eerie way, Robbe-Grillet’s highly rhetorical style has a tendency to destroy his arguments even as he makes them; critically, this technique complements ideally the self-obliterating anecdote.

  On the question of how to establish the separateness, the autonomy of things, Robbe-Grillet and Miss Sarraute part company. In contemplating her method, she ceases altogether to be “scientific.” Instead she alarmingly intones a hymn to words—all words—for they “possess the qualities needed to seize upon, protect and bring out into the open those subterranean movements that are at once impatient and afraid.” (Are those subterranean movements really “impatient and afraid”?) For her, words possess suppleness, freedom, iridescent richness of shading, and by their nature they are protected “from suspicion and from minute examination.” (In an age of suspicion, to let words off scot-free is an act of singular trust.) Consequently, once words have entered the other person, they swell, explode, and “by virtue of this game of actions and reactions…they constitute a most valuable tool for the novelist.” Which, as the French say, goes without saying.

  But of course words are not at all what she believes they are. All words lie. Or as Professor Frank Kermode put it in Literary Fiction and Reality: “Words, thoughts, patterns of word and thought, are enemies of truth, if you identify that with what may be had by phenomenological reductions.” Nevertheless, Miss Sarraute likes to think that subterranean movements (tropisms) can be captured by words, which might explain why her attitude toward things is so much more conventional than that of Robbe-Grillet, who writes:

  Perhaps Kafka’s staircases lead elsewhere, but they are there, and we look at them step by step following the details of the banisters and the risers.

  This is untrue. First, we do not look at the staircases; we look at a number of words arranged upon a page by a conscious human intelligence which would like us to consider, among a thousand other things, the fact of those staircases. Since a primary concern of the human mind is cause and effect, the reader is bound to speculate upon why those staircases have been shown him; also, since staircases are usually built to connect one man-made level with another, the mind will naturally speculate as to what those two levels are like. Only a far-gone schizophrenic (or an LSD tripper) would find entirely absorbing the description of a banister.

  Perhaps the most naïve aspect of Robbe-Grillet’s theory of fiction is his assumption that words can ever describe with absolute precision anything. At no point does he acknowledge that words are simply fiat for real things; by their nature, words are imprecise and layered with meanings—the signs of things, not the things themselves. Therefore, even if Robbe-Grillet’s goal of achieving a total reality for the world of things was desirable, it would not be possible to do it with language, since the author (that man full of torments and passions) is bound to betray his attitude to the sequence of signs he offered us; he has an “interest” in the matter, or else he would not write. Certainly if he means to reinvent man, then he will want to find a way of defining man through human (yes, psychological) relations as well as through a catalogue of things observed and gestures coolly noted. Wanting to play God, ambition is bound to dictate the order of words, and so the subjective will prevail just as it does in the traditional novel. To follow Robbe-Grillet’s theory to its logical terminus, the only sort of book which might be said to be not a collection of signs of absent things but the actual things themselves would be a collection of ink, paper, cardboard, glue, and typeface, to be assembled or not by the reader-spectator. If this be too heavy a joke, then the ambitious writer must devise a new language which might give the appearance of maintaining the autonomy of things, since the words, new-minted,
will possess a minimum of associations of a subjective or anthropomorphic sort. No existing language will be of any use to him, unless it be that of the Trobriand Islanders: those happy people have no words for “why” or “because”; for them, things just happen. Needless to say, they do not write novels or speculate on the nature of things.

  The philosophic origins of the New Novel can be found (like most things French) in Descartes, whose dualism was the reflection of a split between the subjective and the objective, between the irrational and the rational, between the physical and the metaphysical. In the last century Auguste Comte, accepting this dualism, conceived of a logical empiricism which would emphasize the “purely” objective at the expense of the subjective or metaphysical. An optimist who believed in human progress, Comte saw history as an evolution toward a better society. For him the age of religion and metaphysics ended with the French Revolution. Since that time the human race was living in what he termed “the age of science,” and he was confident that the methods of the positive sciences would enrich and transform human life. At last things were coming into their own. But not until the twentieth century did the methods of science entirely overwhelm the arts of the traditional humanists. To the scientific-minded, all things, including human personality, must in time yield their secrets to orderly experiment. Meanwhile, only that which is verifiable is to be taken seriously; emotive meaning must yield to cognitive meaning. Since the opacity of human character has so far defeated all objective attempts at illumination, the New Novelists prefer, as much as possible, to replace the human with objects closely observed and simple gestures noted but not explained.