by John Updike
African space of another kind, and patience of a more literary sort, figure in Walter Abish’s remarkable, ludicrously programmatic novel Alphabetical Africa. The adventure Mr. Abish has set himself is to compose a novel of twice twenty-six chapters, of which the first employs only words beginning with “A,” the second words beginning with “A” and “B,” and so on up to “Z,” by which time the full lexical possibilities of the English language are available; then, from “Z” to “A,” he moves back down the alphabet, subtracting letters one by one until the last chapter, like the first, is composed entirely of words beginning with “A.” The hardships of such a journey should not be underestimated; “A” brings with it a handy number of articles and connectives, but not until “H” is reached can the pronoun “he” and the helper verb “have” be used, and for all but the fourteen chapters between “T” and “T” such virtually indispensable formations as “the,” “to,” “they,’ “their,” and “this” must be dispensed with. A character called Queen Quat cannot appear until after the middle of the ascending alphabet is reached, and must perish on the downhill side when her letter vanishes. Fortunately, Mr. Abish’s style, even when unhampered by artificial constraints, is rather chastened and elliptic, so his fettered progress is steadier than you might imagine. Here is a paragraph from the first chapter:
Africa again: Antelopes, alligators, ants and attractive Alva, are arousing all angular Africans, also arousing author’s analytically aggressive anticipations, again and again. Anyhow author apprehends Alva anatomically, affirmatively, and also accurately.
By the time his verbal safari reaches “G,” Abish can make, at length and almost fluently, observations reminiscent of Moravia’s:
Genuine gestures are African gestures, because Africans can by a few gestures demonstrate a deep and abiding affection between altogether different foreign bodies, each clap, each groan, each facial gesture conveying a convincingly eternal dramatic African confusion and also a fusion of bodies, as bodies explore boundaries, generously emitting a fresh African ecstasy …
“I” releases the possibility of self-exposition, “M” brings with it the themes of memory and money and murder, and by “S” only an alerted eye and hypersensitive ear would notice that a quarter of the dictionary is still being abjured:
Summarizing Africa: I can speak more freely. I find fewer and fewer impediments. Soon I’ll reach my destination. Soon I’ll also complete my documentation and my book. Daily Africa is shrinking from extreme heat and fatigue, as rebels in bush battle African armies led by foreigners.
The attainment, long anticipated by the alphabet-battered reader, of “Z”s total freedom brings a disappointingly short chapter, written in the cramped, clicking tone of the others:
Zambia helps fill our zoos, and our doubts, and our extrawide screens as we sit back. Each year we zigzag between the cages, prodding the alligators, the antelopes, the giant ants, just to see them move about a bit, just to make our life more authentic …
Each chapter, as it possesses another letter, celebrates its acquisition with a burst of alliteration, so our knowledge of systematic expansion is aurally emphasized; this subtly joyous undertone of organic growth is lost in the book’s second half, wherein the subtraction of letters echoes supposed land shrinkage (“Africa’s gradual deterioration and Africa’s decreasing area”), and some violent events on Zanzibar swallow up Queen Quat (who has painted Tanzania orange to match the maps) and squeeze the novel’s protagonists—Alex, Allen, and Alva—into a climax of betrothal. The extremely silly plot begins as a jewel robbery in Antibes and a consequent flight to Angola, Burundi, Chad, etc., and culminates in a kind of people’s uprising by the Vietcong-like army ants: “All complain close-by artillery barrage battered beautiful city, battered beautiful avenues, all because ants continue advance, continue creeping along, carving a continent.” Though the tale is murky as well as absurd, one is tempted to concede that Mr. Abish has performed as well as anyone could, given such extravagant handicaps. “A masterpiece of its kind” does not seem too strong an accolade for a book apt to be the only one of its kind.
And there is a nice rightness to setting such a work in Africa, where incantations are still potent and national boundaries slice across tribal realities as arbitrarily as the alphabet schematizes language. Teeming yet vacant, mysterious yet monotonous, Africa permits this literary experiment. Alphabetical Asia would not have been so funny, Alphabetical America would have been cluttered with reality, Alphabetical Antarctica would have been blank. “Africa is a favorite topic in literature, it gives license to so much excess,” the author explains, and confesses, of his old bush jacket, that it “fed my imagination long before I ever set foot on this continent.” Mr. Abish is pictured on the dust jacket wearing this bush jacket, and a romantic black eye patch, in a studio containing African sculptures. For the Western mind, art and fancy and travellers’ accounts form Africa’s body. Though Alphabetical Africa gives some evidence that the author has visited the continent, it was not necessary; his Swahili dictionary and a four-color map took him where he wanted to go. Setting out with his elaborate impedimenta, he chose the mental milieu that offered him the most license and sport. Africa, explored and excavated and neocapitalized as it now is, remains—for Mr. Abish as for Moravia, as it was for Leakey and Livingstone, for Gide and Hemingway, for Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, for Burton and Speke and Mungo Park and Prince Henry the Navigator—an invitation to the imagination.
* See “Excerpts from a Symposium.”
THE AVANT GARDE
Grove Is My Press, and Avant My Garde
LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated from the French by Richard Howard. 154 pp. Grove Press, 1966.
MIRACLE OF THE ROSE, by Jean Genet, translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman. 344 pp. Grove Press, 1966.
THE INQUISITORY, by Robert Pinget, translated from the French by Donald Watson. 399 pp. Grove Press, 1966.
Grove Press, that happy caterer to our prurience and our progressivism, continues to nourish the illusion of a literary avant garde by dishing up hitherto obscure modern masters (Borges, Gombrowicz), pornography with a taint of sociological or psychological interest (My Secret Life, The Story of O), native scatwriting (LeRoi Jones, William Burroughs), and such imported delicacies as the three French novels about to be savored. The smörgåsbord is mixed but not to be sniffed at. On balance, Grove Press has been the one post-war publishing house to show a personality and mission of its own, to serve the fifties and sixties as New Directions served the thirties and forties. Its courage has preceded its commercialism; it pioneered in the territory it now so cheerfully exploits with its black-mass version of the Book-of-the-Month Club, its roguish get-with-the-sexual-revolution ads, its stable of Ph.D.s willing to preface the latest “curious” memoir or “underground” classic with admonitory sermons on the righteousness of fornication. And if Grove Press’s best American author remains Eric Berne, its Art Nouveau jackets have enfolded many foreign titles for whose translation the conscientious reader should be grateful.
It is surprising, for instance, that no more orthodox publisher undertook to make the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet available in this country. Robbe-Grillet is the leading theoretician of the nouveau roman; he coined the phrase and composed the first example—The Erasers (1953). If American writers, and loud worriers like Susan Sontag (“The novel is probably the most rear-guard art form today.… Most critically respectable novels … are, I think, essentially journalistic in conception.… [American novelists] are not essentially concerned with the novel as a work of art in the sense that most other art forms are today …”), imagine that progress is being made elsewhere, Robbe-Grillet’s astute propagandizing is a prime cause. The tired cry “Make it new” has become new in his essays, and before the consideration of his fifth and most recent novel, his program should be summarized. The first major manifesto, “A Fresh Start for Fiction” (1956), announced:
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nbsp; The world is neither significant nor absurd. It is, quite simply. That, in any case, is the most remarkable thing about it.… Around us, defying the mob of our animistic or protective adjectives, the things are there. Their surfaces are clear and smooth, intact, neither dubiously glittering, nor transparent. All our literature has not yet succeeded in penetrating their smallest corner, in softening their slightest curve.
Instead of … “signification” (psychological, social, functional), we must try to construct a world both more solid and more immediate. Let it be first of all by their presence that objects and gestures impose themselves, and let this presence continue to make itself felt beyond all explanatory theory that might try to enclose it in some system of reference, whether sentimental, sociological, Freudian, or metaphysical. In this future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be “there” before being “something,” and they will still be there afterward, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own meaning, which tries in vain to reduce them to the role of precarious tools.… Thus objects will little by little lose their inconsistency and their secrets; will renounce their false mystery, that suspect interiority which Roland Barthes has called the “romantic ‘heart’ of things.”
A later essay, “Nature, Humanism, Tragedy” (1958), develops these ideas into a stylistic purge. Metaphor is the villain, weaving a complicity between humanity and the alien world of “things”; metaphor—a concept including all adjectives with moral or anthropocentric coloring—implies a general myth of depth, humanizing nature, cheating it of its essential otherness. The categories of the “tragic” and the “absurd” are oblique maneuvers of this persistent humanism, this “bridge of souls thrown between man and things.” The task, then, is to “scour” descriptive prose of any “analogical vocabulary” and to restore “things” to “themselves,” cleansed of any hint of profundity or preëstablished order. In this scouring, the sense of sight occupies a privileged position, as the sense that measures distances—“our best weapon, especially if it keeps exclusively to outlines.” And in a still later essay, “Time and Description in Fiction Today” (1963), Robbe-Grillet adds to the priority of visual precision “the breaks of cutting, the repetitions of scene, the contradictions, the characters suddenly paralyzed as in amateur photographs” that in fact do distinguish his later novels and his films alike. The purpose of these devices is to “afford this perpetual present [of the cinema, of the nouveau roman] all its force, all its violence.” Temporal and spatial discontinuity, a present that never accumulates, are employed to dissolve “the trap of the anecdote.” The thereness of things emerges from their dissolution.
Robbe-Grillet’s theories constitute the most ambitious aesthetic program since Surrealism. My summary necessarily has skimped much: his reasoning is close; his remarks upon other writers, including the classics of the bourgeois novel, are reverent and lively. Because of his training as an agronomist, his understanding of science and of how its truths subvert our workaday assumptions exceeds that of most writers. His pronouncements do catch at something—a texture, an austerity—already present in other, often older French novelists, such as Nathalie Sarraute. To an American, however, there is a hollow ring of Thomism. Robbe-Grillet’s concept of thereness looks like the medieval quidditas; the attempt to treat existence itself as a quality that can be artistically emphasized seems a formal confusion, a scholastic bottling of the wind. Robbe-Grillet’s key concept—of “purely external and superficial” things—takes no account of the vast area of mobile and animate phenomena that mediate between Homo sapiens and inert matter, or of the difference between raw material and artifacts already imbued with human intention, or of the fact that to one man another is as much a “thing” as a chair or waterfall. In making his cleavage between “humanity” and “things,” is he not guilty of a kind of humanism, elevating men into a glorious concept—Man? The real split, surely, is between the single ego and the external world—which would take us back into psychology, where Robbe-Grillet does not want to go. There is a forced naïveté in his vision, and a strange inversion of the pathetic fallacy he detests, for in artistic practice his concern with the inviolable otherness of things charges them, saturates them, with a menace and hostility as distortive of their null inner being as an imagined sympathy. One’s reservations about Robbe-Grillet’s formulations come down to the discrepancy between his description of what happens in his fiction and what actually happens. Far from striking us with their unsullied thereness, the “things” in his novels are implicated in the pervasive flimsiness and inconsequence.
La Maison de Rendez-Vous could have been translated as The House of Assignation or The Blue Villa or even Up at Lady Ava’s. It tells of, or circles around, a night at the elegant brothel run by Lady Ava, or Eva, or Eve, in Hong Kong. There is a police raid, and an American, or Englishman, named Ralph or Sir Ralph Johnson or Jonestone, in love with a prostitute called Lauren, and the murder of a man called Edouard Manneret and of another named Georges Marchat or Marchant or Marchand, and several ferry rides to Kowloon, and a fluctuating penumbra of dope smuggling and white slavery and Cold War intrigue. Above it all is an “old mad king” pounding an iron-tipped cane on the floor and insomniacally rocking in a rocking chair; his name is given as King Boris, but he strongly resembles Manneret. The other presiding presence is a narrator who confesses to being constantly beset by images of female flesh and who sometimes inhabits Johnson’s body or partakes of his adventures. Through this fog of events, or anti-events (“What does all that matter? What does it matter?” the book asks itself, answering, “All this comes to the same thing”), rotates a constellation of repeated and refracted images—a broken champagne glass, an envelope containing sand or heroin or documents, a scrap of paper illustrating the evils of drugs or else pushing them, a ubiquitous rickshaw driver, the slit hobble skirt of several interchangeable Eurasian beauties who are also mannequins in shop-windows. True to Robbe-Grillet’s credo, the present never accumulates; rather, it unravels. There is a studied false numerical precision. A hand is “about eight or twelve” inches from a serving tray; forty pages later, the distance is given as six inches. Manneret’s apartment is on the third floor, or the fifth, or the sixth, or the eighth. Different characters relive the same adventures; a play within the action becomes the action; and twin servant girls have the same name, “pronounced quite similarly, the difference imperceptible except to a Chinese ear.” The ingenuity behind all this doubling and shuffling is considerable. The writing is clean and deft and even entertaining, though the reader’s interest tends to cling, pathetically, to the excitements of the hackneyed tale of exotic intrigue that is being parodied, fragmented, and systematically frustrated. The popular adventure form underlying the sophisticated nouveau roman rises up and revenges itself by imposing upon the book a cliché ending of double-cross and a flat last sentence: “And there is nothing in her eyes.” But there has never been anything in her eyes. Upon the basis, I think, of false analogies, Robbe-Grillet has already dissolved, with his “descriptions whose movement destroys all confidence in the things described,” the credibility as elemental to the art of narrative as the solidity of stone or metal is to sculpture.
The analogies are with the cinema and modern painting. The 20th-century novelist finds himself in competition with a mode of storytelling—motion pictures—that is astonishing in the directness with which it presents and manipulates imagery and virtually tyrannical in its possession of the viewer’s attention and in its power to compel emotion. The novel, rooted in the historical past tense of the histories, legends, journals, and epistles from which it is descended, cannot but envy this constant present that does not tell but simply is, dancing and slicing through space, juxtaposing in montage landscapes and faces, swords and roses, violence and stasis—a new poetry, a wordless vocabulary that engulfs us like an environment. Ulysses was one of the first attempts, and remains the noblest, to appropriate to prose fiction some of the new medium’s properti
es—the simultaneous intimacy and impersonality, the abrupt shifts from close-up to boom shot, the electric shuttle of scenes. Joyce immerses these effects in an orgy of literariness; Robbe-Grillet’s fiction is almost exclusively cinematic. La Maison de Rendez-Vous is not so much written as scripted: “The scene which then takes place lacks clarity,” “Then the images follow one another very rapidly,” “Now we see the young Eurasian girl backed into the corner of a luxurious room, near a lacquer chest whose lines are emphasized by bronze ornaments, all escape cut off by a man in a carefully trimmed gray goatee who is towering over her.” The full syntax of splicing, blurring, stop-action, enlargement, panning, and fade-out is employed; the book lacks only camera tracks and a union member operating the dolly. The trouble is that prose does not inherently possess the luminous thereness of a projected image, and all of Robbe-Grillet’s montages, visual particularization, careful distinctions between right and left, and so on do not induce the kind of participation imposed by, say, his real movie Last Year at Marienbad. A man sitting with a book in his lap is a creature quite different from a man sitting hypnotized in a dark theatre. The mind translates verbal imagery into familiar images innocent of a photograph’s staring actuality; it seizes on a single detail and enshrouds it in vague memories from real life. An image, to have more than this hazy recollective vitality, must be weighted with a momentum beyond itself, by that movement of merged relevance that Aristotle called an “action.”
