Against Interpretation

by Susan Sontag

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  Perhaps the best approach to Sarraute’s polemic for an English-speaking reader would be to compare it with two other manifestoes on what the novel should be, Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and Mary McCarthy’s “The Fact in Fiction.” Sarraute scorns as “naïve” Virginia Woolf’s dismissal of naturalism and objective realism, her call to the modern novelist to examine “the dark places of psychology.” But Sarraute is equally hard on the position represented by Mary McCarthy’s essay, which may be read as a rebuttal of Virginia Woolf, calling as it does for a return to the old novelistic virtues of setting forth a real world, giving a sense of verisimilitude, and constructing memorable characters.

  Sarraute’s case against realism is a convincing one. Reality is not that unequivocal; life is not that lifelike. The immediate cozy recognition that the lifelike in most novels induces is, and should be, suspect. (Truly, as Sarraute says, the genius of the age is suspicion. Or, if not its genius, at least its besetting vice.) I wholeheartedly sympathize with what she objects to in the old-fashioned novel: Vanity Fair and Buddenbrooks, when I reread them recently, however marvellous they still seemed, also made me wince. I could not stand the omnipotent author showing me that’s how life is, making me compassionate and tearful; with his obstreperous irony, his confidential air of perfectly knowing his characters and leading me, the reader, to feel I knew them too. I no longer trust novels which fully satisfy my passion to understand. Sarraute is right, too, that the novel’s traditional machinery for furnishing a scene, and describing and moving about characters, does not justify itself. Who really cares about the furniture of so-and-so’s room, or whether he lit a cigarette or wore a dark gray suit or uncovered the typewriter after sitting down and before inserting a sheet of paper in the typewriter? Great movies have shown that the cinema can invest pure physical action—whether fleeting and small-scale like the wig-changing in L’Avventura, or important like the advance through the forest in The Big Parade—with more immediate magic than words ever can, and more economically, too.

  More complex and problematic, however, is Sarraute’s insistence that psychological analysis in the novel is equally obsolete and misguided. “The word ‘psychology,’” Sarraute says, “is one that no present-day writer can hear spoken with regard to himself without averting his gaze and blushing.” By psychology in the novel, she means Woolf, Joyce, Proust: novels which explore a substratum of hidden thoughts and feelings beneath action, the depiction of which replaces the concern with character and plot. All Joyce brought up from these depths, she remarks, was an uninterrupted flow of words. And Proust, too, failed. In the end Proust’s elaborate psychological dissections recompose themselves into realistic characters, in which the practiced reader “immediately recognizes a rich man of the world in love with a kept woman, a prominent, awkward, gullible doctor, a parvenu bourgeoise or a snobbish ‘great lady,’ all of which will soon take their places in the vast collection of fictitious characters that people his imaginary museum.”

  Actually Sarraute’s novels are not so unlike Joyce’s (and Woolf’s) as she thinks, and her rejection of psychology is far from total. What she wants herself is precisely the psychological, but (and this is the basis of her complaint against Proust) without the possibility of any conversion back into “character” and “plot.” She is against psychological dissection, for that assumes there is a body to dissect. She is against a provisional psychology, against psychology as a new means to the old end. The use of the psychological microscope must not be intermittent, a device merely in the furthering of the plot. This means a radical recasting of the novel. Not only must the novelist not tell a story; he must not distract the reader with gross events like a murder or a great love. The more minute, the less sensational the event the better. (Thus Martereau consists of the ruminations of a nameless young man, an interior decorator, about the artistic aunt and rich businessman uncle with whom he lives, and about an older, not-so-well-off man named Martereau, concerning why and in what circumstances he feels comfortable with them, and why and when he feels he is succumbing to the force of their personalities and the objects with which they surround themselves. The aunt and uncle’s project of buying a house in the country provide the only “action” of the book, and if for a time it is suspected that Martereau has defrauded the uncle in the matter of the house, you can bet that in the end all suspicions are allayed. In The Planetarium something does happen. A social-climbing young man, shamelessly trying to gain admittance to the circle of a rich, vain, and very famous woman writer, actually does manage to dispossess his doting, gullible aunt from her five-room apartment.) But Sarraute’s characters do not really ever act. They scheme, they throb, they shudder—under the impact of the minutiae of daily life. These preliminaries and gropings toward action are the real subject of her novels. Since analysis is out—that is, the speaking, interpreting author is out—Sarraute’s novels are logically written only in the first person, even when the interior musings use “she” and “he.”

  What Sarraute proposes is a novel written in continuous monologue, in which dialogue between characters is a functional extension of monologue, “real” speech a continuation of silent speech. This kind of dialogue she calls “sub-conversation.” It is comparable to theatrical dialogue in that the author does not intervene or interpret, but unlike theatrical dialogue it is not broken up or assigned to clearly separable characters. (She has some particularly sharp and mocking words to say about the creaky he said’s, she replied’s, so-and-so declared’s with which most novels are strewn.) Dialogue must “become vibrant and swollen with those tiny inner movements that propel and extend it.” The novel must disavow the means of classical psychology—introspection—and proceed instead by immersion. It must plunge the reader “into the stream of those subterranean dramas of which Proust only had time to obtain a rapid aerial view, and concerning which he observed and reproduced nothing but the broad motionless outlines.” The novel must record without comment the direct and purely sensory contact with things and persons which the “I” of the novelist experiences. Abstaining from all creating of likenesses (Sarraute hands that over to the cinema), the novel must preserve and promote “that element of indetermination, of opacity and mystery that one’s own actions always have for the one who lives them.”

  There is something exhilarating in Sarraute’s program for the novel, which insists on an unlimited respect for the complexity of human feelings and sensations. But there is, for me, a certain softness in her argument, based as it is on a diagnosis of psychology that is both excessively doctrinaire in its remedy and equivocal. A view which regards “the efforts of Henry James or Proust to take apart the delicate wheelworks of our inner mechanisms” as wielding a pick and shovel has dazzling standards of psychological refinement indeed. Who would contradict Sarraute when she characterizes the feelings as an immense mobile mass in which almost anything can be found; or when she says that no theory, least of all a cipher like psychoanalysis, can give an account of all its movements? But Sarraute is only attacking psychology in the novel on behalf of a better, closer technique of psychological description.

  Her views of the complexity of feeling and sensation are one thing, her program for the novel another. True, all accounts of motivation simplify. But, admitting that, there still remain many choices available to the novelist besides seeking a more refined and microscopic way of representing motives. Certain kinds of overviews, for example—which scant the minutiae of feeling altogether—are, I am sure, at least as valid a solution to the problem Sarraute raises as the technique of dialogue and narration which she takes as the logical consequence of her critique. Character may be (as Sarraute insists) an ocean, a confluence of tides and streams and eddies, but I do not see the privileged value of immersion. Skin-diving has its place, but so has oceanic cartography, what Sarraute contemptuously dismisses as “the aerial view.” Man is a creature who is designed to live on the surface; he lives in the depths
—whether terrestrial, oceanic, or psychological—at his peril. I do not share her contempt for the novelist’s effort to transmute the watery shapeless depths of experience into solid stuff, to impose outlines, to give fixed shape and sensuous body to the world. That it’s boring to do it in the old ways goes without saying. But I cannot agree that it should not be done at all.

  Sarraute invites the writer to resist the desire to amuse his contemporaries, to reform them, to instruct them, or to fight for their emancipation; and simply, without trimming or smoothing or overcoming contradictions, to present “reality” (the word is Sarraute’s) as he sees it, with as great a sincerity and sharpness of vision as he is capable. I will not here dispute the question of whether the novel should amuse, reform, or instruct (why should it not, so long as it justifies itself as a work of art?) but only point out what a tendentious definition of reality she proposes. Reality, for Sarraute, means a reality that is rid of the “preconceived ideas and ready-made images that encase it.” It is opposed to “the surface reality that everyone can easily see and which, for want of anything better, everyone uses.” According to Sarraute, for a writer to be in contact with reality he must “attain something that is thus far unknown, which, it seems to him, he is the first to have seen.”

  But what is the point of this multiplication of realities? For truly, it is the plural rather than the singular that Sarraute should have used. If each writer must “bring to light this fragment of reality that is his own”—and all the whales and sharks have been catalogued; it is new species of plankton she is after—then the writer not only is a maker of fragments, but is condemned to being an exponent only of what is original in his own subjectivity. When he comes to the literary arena bearing his jar of tiny, and as yet uncatalogued, marine specimens, are we to welcome him in the name of science? (The writer as marine biologist.) Of sport? (The writer as deep-sea diver.) Why does he deserve an audience? How many fragments of reality do readers of novels need?

  By invoking the notion of reality at all, Sarraute has, in fact, narrowed and compromised her argument when she need not have done so. The metaphor of the work of art as a representation of reality should be retired for a while; it has done good service throughout the history of the analysis of works of art, but now it can scarcely fail to skirt the important issues. In Sarraute’s exposition, it has the unfortunate result of giving further life to the tedious alternatives of subjectivity versus objectivity, the original versus what is preconceived and ready-made. There is no reason why the novelist cannot make new arrangements and transformations of what everybody has seen, and restrict himself precisely to preconceived ideas and ready-made images.

  Sarraute’s allegiance to this rather vacuous notion of reality (a reality lying in the depths rather than the surface) is also responsible for the unnecessarily grim tone of some of her admonitions. Her chilly dismissal of the possibility of the writer’s providing “aesthetic enjoyment” to his readers is mere rhetoric, and does serious injustice to the position she, in part, ably represents. The writer, she says, must renounce “all desire to write ‘beautifully’ for the pleasure of doing so, to give aesthetic enjoyment to himself or to his readers.” Style is “capable of beauty only in the sense that any athlete’s gesture is beautiful; the better it is adapted to its purpose, the greater the beauty.” The purpose, remember, is the recording of the writer’s unique apprehension of an unknown reality. But there is absolutely no reason to equate “aesthetic enjoyment,” which every work of art is by definition designed to supply, with the notion of a frivolous, decorative, merely “beautiful” style.… It really is science, or better yet sport, that Sarraute has in mind as model for the novel. The final justification for the novelist’s quest as Sarraute characterizes it—what for her frees the novel from all moral and social purposes—is that the novelist is after truth (or a fragment of it), like the scientist, and after functional exercise, like the athlete. And there is nothing, in principle, so objectionable about these models, except their meaning for her. For all the basic soundness of Sarraute’s critique of the old-fashioned novel, she still has the novelist chasing after “truth” and “reality.”

  Sarraute’s manifesto must thus be finally judged to do less justice to the position she is defending than that position deserves. A more rigorous and searching account of this position may be found in Robbe-Grillet’s essays “On Several Dated Notions” and “Nature, Humanism, and Tragedy.” These appeared in 1957 and 1958, respectively, while Sarraute’s were published between 1950 and 1955, and collected in book form in 1956; and Robbe-Grillet has cited Sarraute in a way that might lead one to think that he is a later exponent of the same position. But Robbe-Grillet’s complex criticism of the notions of tragedy and of humanism, the unremitting clarity with which he demolishes the old shibboleth of form versus content (his willingness, for example, to declare that the novel, so far as it belongs in the domain of art, has no content), the compatibility of his aesthetic with technical innovations in the novel quite different from those he has chosen, put his arguments on a far higher level than those of Sarraute. Robbe-Grillet’s essays are truly radical and, if one grants but a single of his assumptions, carry one all the way to conviction. Sarraute’s essays, useful as they may be to introduce the literate English-speaking public to the important critique of the traditional novel which has been launched in France, in the end hedge and compromise.

  Undoubtedly, many people will feel that the prospects for the novel laid out by the French critics are rather bleak; and wish that the armies of art would go on fighting on other battlefronts and leave the novel alone. (In the same mood, some of us wish we were endowed with a good deal less of the excruciating psychological self-consciousness that is the burden of educated people in our time.) But the novel as a form of art has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by joining the revolution that has already swept over most of the other arts. It is time that the novel became what it is not, in England and America with rare and unrelated exceptions: a form of art which people with serious and sophisticated taste in the other arts can take seriously.

  [1963; revised 1965]

  III

  Ionesco

  IT IS fitting that a playwright whose best works apotheosize the platitude has compiled a book on the theater crammed with platitudes.12 I quote, at random:

  Didacticism is above all an attitude of mind and an expression of the will to dominate.

  A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.

  Some have said that Boris Vian’s The Empire Builders was inspired by my own Amédée. Actually, no one is inspired by anyone except by his own self and his own anguish.

  I detect a crisis of thought, which is manifested by a crisis of language; words no longer meaning anything.

  No society has even been able to abolish human sadness; no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute.

  What is one to make of a view at once so lofty and so banal? As if this were not enough, Ionesco’s essays are laden with superfluous self-explication and unctuous vanity. Again, at random:

  I can affirm that neither the public nor the critics have influenced me.

  Perhaps I am socially minded in spite of myself.

  With me every play springs from a kind of self-analysis.

  I am not an ideologue, for I am straightforward and objective.

  The world ought not to interest me so much. In reality, I am obsessed with it.

  Etcetera, etcetera. Ionesco’s essays on the theater offer a good deal of such, presumably unconscious, humor.

  There are, to be sure, some ideas in Notes and Counter Notes worth taking seriously, none of them original with Ionesco. One is the idea of the theater as an instrument which, by dislocating the real, freshens the sense of reality. Such a function for the theater plainly calls not only for a new dramaturgy, but for a new body of plays. “No more masterpieces,” Artaud demanded in The Theatre and It
s Double, the most daring and profound manifesto of the modern theater. Like Artaud, Ionesco scorns the “literary” theater of the past: he likes to read Shakespeare and Kleist but not to see them performed, while Corneille, Molière, Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Giraudoux and company bore him either way. If the old-fashioned theater pieces must be done at all, Ionesco suggests (as did Artaud) a certain trick. One should play “against” the text: by grafting a serious, formal production onto a text that is absurd, wild, comic, or by treating a solemn text in the spirit of buffoonery. Along with the rejection of the literary theater—the theater of plot and individual character—Ionesco calls for the scrupulous avoidance of all psychology, for psychology means “realism,” and realism is dull and confines the imagination. His rejection of psychology permits the revival of a device common to all non-realistic theatrical traditions (it is equivalent to frontality in naïve painting), in which the characters turn to face the audience (rather than each other), stating their names, identities, habits, tastes, acts … All this, of course, is very familiar: the canonical modern style in the theater. Most of the interesting ideas in Notes and Counter Notes are watered-down Artaud; or rather Artaud spruced up and made charming, ingratiating; Artaud without his hatreds, Artaud without his madness. Ionesco comes closest to being original in certain remarks about humor, which he understands as poor mad Artaud did not at all. Artaud’s notion of a Theater of Cruelty emphasized the darker registers of fantasy: frenzied spectacle, melodramatic deeds, bloody apparitions, screams, transports. Ionesco, noting that any tragedy becomes comic simply if it is speeded up, has devoted himself to the violently comic. Instead of the cave or the palace or the temple or the heath, he sets most of his plays in the living room. His comic terrain is the banality and oppressiveness of the “home”—be it the bachelor’s furnished room, the scholar’s study, the married couple’s parlor. Underneath the forms of conventional life, Ionesco would demonstrate, lies madness, the obliteration of personality.