To the barricades! BOOKS
HENRY TUBE
It has been apparent for some time that, in common with many other aspects of our national scene, ihe English novel is in a parlous plight. Yes, we have Anthony Powell, yes, above all, we still have Ivy Compton-Burnett, but where have all the *newer flowers gone? Gone to seed every one, and in his' lucid, in- telligent book (The Reaction Against Experi- ment in the English Novel 1950.1960, Columbia University Press 67s 6d) Rubin Rabinovitz of Columbia University makes it clear why. Begin- ning with a general survey of the English novel in the decade 1950-60, Mr Rabinovitz proceeds to examine in a chapter apiece Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson and C. P. Snow. He finds, making copious use of their articles and criticisms of other writers as well as of their own fiction, what will be no surprise to anyone, least of all the authors concerned, that they are Lac- tionaries, deliberately spurning the experi- mentalism of Joyce and Virginia Woolf and looking for their influences to the Victorians, the Bennett-Wells axis and even, here and there, to the eighteenth century.
Mr Rabinovitz is not polemical. Indeed, so levet and unemotional is his tone that it is hard to tell, until one reaches his short con- clusion, —The Drawbacks of Traditionalism,' whether he approves or disapproves of his sub- jects' retrogressive tendencies, and even then he reserves his final volley for the reviewers; The indictment here is against the entire school of English reviewers of contemporary fiction, who as -[F. R.] Karl says, "applaud what they recognise and reject what looks foreign." The novelist . . . who can succeed in spite of bad reviews is rare; when the critical climate is unvaried enough to be predictable, writers who know they will get bad reviews must either conform or stop writing.'
This side of the Atlantic it is not so easy to be dispassionate; we are the ones who are being smothered. To the barricades, then, readers, fellow-reviewers! Let us root out these neo-Victorian oppressors, let our sword not sleep in our hand until we have built a Borges, a Robbe-Gallet, a Sarraute, or rather their supplanters, in England's desert!
It is not simply a question—as Angus Wilson has said in dusting down Arnold Ben- nett after his assault at the hand of Virginia Woolf—of it being the duty of a younger generation to reinstate the writers their fathers rejected. The issue, in a curious way, goes out- side literature altogether. It is curious, because the experimentalists, particularly Robbe-Grillet, are often attacked for being a sort of rarefied dandies, artists for art's sake, lacking 'humanity,' the `social message,' etc etc. Whereas the neo-Victorians are supposed, and suppose themselves, to be dealing with life today. But the truth is that in borrowing earlier modes of expression, earlier forms, what were once 'experiments,' they impose on our life today a totally false vision. The Victorians had every reason to evolve a type of 'meaningful' narrative to convey the life of their own time as they saw it. And the more recent 'absualists' have, of course, simply turned the same coin the other way up. But though human nature may not change from one aeon to another, the words, concepts and supposed 'purposes' in which human beings dress their nature are always in process of wearing out. A novelist never does more disservice to 'humanity' and 'society' than when he makes them tailors' dummies for the tattered fashions of the past.
Which brings us pat to Alain Robbe-Grillet himself, one of whose particular quarrels with the neo-Victorians (Balzacians, to him) is that they are pathetically anthropocentric. They will persist in seeing a mountain as 'majestic,' a village as `crouching' at the mountain's foot. 'But,' writes M Robbe-Grillet in a 1956 essay, `the world is neither meaningful nor absurd. It quite simply is . . . all around us, defying our pack of animistic or domesticating adjec- tives, things are there.' And applying this to the novel, he writes: `So that the first impact of objects and gestures should be that of their presence, and that this presence should then continue to dominate, taking precedence over any explanatory theory which would attempt to imprison them in some system of refer- ence, whether it be sentimental, sociological, Freudian, metaphysical, or any other.'
One should not, in 1968, be having to justify M Robbe-Grillet, any more than one should be having to say what is wrong with C. P. Snow —which Mr Rabinovitz does at length. But then we must remember that it is not primarily a matter of literary taste. The old Inquisition died hard, and so will the new. I quote M Robbe-Grillet once more: To simplify the position of our new inquisitors, we can sum it up in a couple of sentences: if I say: "The world is man," I shall always obtain absolution, whereas if I say : "Things are things, and man is only man," I am immediately convicted of a crime against humanity.' At least one of the English reviews of his newly translated novel In the Labyrinth (Calder and Boyars 30s) has already furnished a classic illustration.
The novel itself, first published in French in 1959, now translated by Christine Brooke- Rose, is in every way a vindication of M Robbe-Grillet's theoretical platform. Just be- cause it is such an enormous relief to be shown the world in fresh colours, free of those fustian systems of reference, free of symbolism, roman- tic melancholia, absurdism, all the stale clutter, the sense of exhilaration one feels is perhaps alien to the book, and M Robbe-Grillet might even be sorry to hear that one exults in his objectivity for such subjective reasons. The method, a series of images superimposed on one another, coalescing, separating, returning, derives partly from Kafka. That is to say, although every detail is drawn with pains- taking clarity, the elisional system of dove- tailing and the subtle changes of tense give an overall impression of confusion, exactly as in dream or memory.
But the sense of menace, of powers in the offing which could crush if they would, is largely removed, so that the final effect is mere of a pleasant or at least neutral dream than of nightmare. And on further reading, even the first impression of confusion disappears, just as one feels that if one could return to a par- ticular dream, its organisation would become
perfectly clear. One says 'images' and thinks immediately of the author's excursions into the cinema, but though the photographic quality of the methods stands out, I believe it has as much in common. with music. The way that certain visual motifs—a checked tablecloth, wooden stairs, even characters—continually reappear throughout the novel, but in quite different scenes, is certainly musical, and achieves that mixture of variation with recognition which is one of music's chief pleasures.
Paolo Volponi reveals himself in his first novel, The Memorandum (translated by Belem Sevareid, Calder and Boyars 30s), as another disciple of Kafka, though compared with his great original and with M Robbe-Grillet he is a miniaturist. He makes no attempt like M Robbe-Grillet to develop the form of the novel as a vehicle for its content, but goes to work delicately and quietly on Kafka's central theme, the relationship between the protagonist and authority. But Signor Volponi's special twist, and a most interesting one, is to bring authority down from its castle, dark, vague, ultimately unseen, and locate it in the cool, hygienic, absolutely recognisable everyday world of northern industrial Italy. This authority, far from being a monster, is an en- lightened factory management, scrupulous to the point of maternalism for its employees' welfare; but the protagonist, who is also the narrator, is paranoiac. Thus we are enabled to observe Kafka's central. situation as it were from both sides, for the narrator tells us his side of it and elicits great sympathy the while, but we can appreciate the other side from our own knowledge of the world, our own sanity. Signor Volponi's style is so quiet as to be in danger of monotony at times, but his con- fidence in his material is already remarkable • for a first novel, and I look forward to the two Others which are said to be in preparation.
We return, with a sinking feeliag, to the contemporary English novel. Julian Mitchell has evidently had the same feeling, for he attempts a few 'experimental' acrobatics-in his sixth novel, The Undiscovered Country (Con- stable 30s). The first part is a straightforward account, in the 'be true to yourself' manner which owes a good deal to Simone de Beauvoir as well as the English neo-Victorians, of his own relationship with his 'best friend.' To give the thing a semblance of freshness, as some butchers are said to colour old meat, Mc Mitchell calls his protagonist Julian Mitchell, and so far as one can tell keeps closely to his own curriculum vitae, as summarised on the dust-jacket. He would also have us believe, in a note at the beginning of the book, that the 'best friend' was a real person, now dead, whose name only has been changed out of deference to his relations. It may be so, but though one is certainly fascinated by the banality of the two chums' conversation, one is not finally convinced of the imaginative existence of either Mr Mitchell or his friend. The second part, which purports to be the friend's novel, is a tedious exercise in pastiche and makes one at least thankful that Mr Mitchell, not his friend, wrote the first 167 pages.
And so to the nadir, Robert Nye's first novel, Doubtfire (Calder and Boyars 30s), which it would have been better not to publish, if only because it is exactly the sort of book which sends people screaming at mention of the word 'experimental.' It is not, as a matter of fact, experimental at all, because Mr Nye has merely swallowed large gobbets of experiment from the pages of Flann O'Brien, Becket et al. and regurgitated them much the worse for wear over his own pages. I think it rather short- sighted of Calder and Boyars, who are doing so much to sharpen up the British literary scene, to queer their pitch with this rubbish. Also—since I have offered them two bouquets above, they may forgive me for a second brick- bat—they really should do something to im- prove the appearance of their dust-jackets. By all means let's man the barricades, but let's do it in style.
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