Matters of fact
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
The French New Novel: Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet John Sturrock (our 42s) 'Nouveau roman' was a term invented by (mainly hostile) journalists to describe the works of a group of novelists—it includes Claude Oilier, Robert Pinget and Nathalie Sarraute as well as the three writers studied by John Sturrock in his new book—who, while they differ sharply from one another in their methods, have in common a dis- trust of and a refusal to employ the con- ventional forms of the nineteenth century, 'particularly the psychological novel and the novel of action. The new novel is so far a uniquely French phenomenon; parallel but not identical developments have occurred in America, Germany, Italy and particularly in South America. In England, despite the anticipation of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Henry Green and others, the phenomenon has hardly been noted, let alone understood —although the novels of Sarraute, Robbe- Grillet, Simon and Butor are all available in English or American translations.
John Sturrock has written an excellent— the most informative available—introduc- tion to the nouveau roman and to the work of three of its chief practitioners. He is not awestruck, as so many Anglo-Saxon exposi- tors of the same material have been in the past, and it is clear that he fully under- stands what he is writing about. His intro- ductory essay is somewhat ponderous, pon- tifical and over-confident, and takes Robbe- Grillet's criticism much too solemnly; but it covers the ground thoroughly and usefully.
Sturrock points out that the new novel is not necessarily negative or pessimistic in its attitudes towards reality; only in its atti- tudes towards certain literary conventions. He explains, better than any other critic I - have read, the Husserlian notion of time that lies behind the new novel (and much other modern fiction): we never recollect experience in terms of 'real' time, which is thus an unnecessary artificiality; the novelist must present subjective time. Gertrude Stein had seen this (with no help from Husserl) in the 'twenties.
The false objectivity of the nineteenth- century novel 'could be justified by invoking the scientific ideas of the nineteenth cen- tury; it can no longer be justified by those of the twentieth'. Mr Sturrock is convincing on the reasons why the older realistic and naturalistic ideologies of the novel are no longer satisfactory, and he shows why his subjects have felt that their novels must be elaborate dramatisations of the creative process itself—this he well compares to cookery, with the modern chef coming more and more out into the open, to allow his customers to see him at work.
It is only a pity that he did not include a fourth discussion, of Sarraute. No doubt her association with the new novel is in some respects fortuitous; but The Age of Sus- picion (1956) is a much more crucial critical text than Robbe-Grillet's too arrogantly dogmatic, although important, Towards a New Novel (1962): it is the most persuasive demonstration of the inadequacy of the traditional forms, and its inevitable auster- ity is modified by a delicacy and subtlety
of which the brash Robbe-Grillet is incap- able; furthermore, Sarraute shows a surer understanding of the past.
Sturrock is so intelligent, and so obvi- ously a careful reader, that his analyses of his three chosen writers can hardly fail to make their novels easier to approach. It is very important that we should understand what such writers are doing, and why they are doing it; that we should see why the wholly conventional novel—practised by contemporaries—is usually an embarrass- ment. 'Once we know how to sublimate,' said the late American psychiatrist, Harry Stack Sullivan, 'we stop sublimating'.
And once we become aware of the falsities of the old form of fiction, so we cease to be able to create it. The few satis- fying 'realist' novels of today are written by innocents, who think of autobiographies as true, and novels as stories. This idea of a `story' is just what the new novel most savagely rejects (although Butor—the most interesting and original of Sturrock's trium- virate—posits fiction as a laboratory for the study of outside reality just because its 'story' cannot be checked). The new novel- ists, on the other hand, tend to see fictions as autobiographies, and autobiographies as fictions—and surely their emphasis is the right one.
Sturrock's enthusiasm is for philosophy, however, rather than fiction. Consequently his real hero is Robbe-Grillet. He can say, wrongly I think, that Butor is by far the most 'dauntingly cerebral' of his novelists. This in fact applies to Robbe-Grillet, whom I believe to be essentially a behaviourist disguising himself as a novelist. The trouble is that even the new novelists will need imagination (even if this term is difficult of definition; and even if many critics triumphantly reject it, thus dragging creativ- ity to the level of their own sterility); Robbe-Grillet's effects, often startling ones, are really philosophical in nature. His violent rejection of the pathetic fallacy is an interesting and provocative one, but it limits the field of his fiction—for people do in fact 'humanise' things (even if reprehens- ibly), and no one does so more than Robbe-Grillet himself, who continually romanticises the 'intact' surfaces of his be- loved neutral objects, sometimes reminding us even of Simenon.
Robbe-Grillet is best when he is most strange, and he is most strange when he is in fact breaking his own rules: he is at heart, perhaps, a romantic. As someone has suggested, he may well be the unfortunate Dujardin for some Joyce: his creative virtues are as trite as those in Les Lauriers Sont Coupes, when compared to his tech- nical discoveries. Sarraute's apprehension of the swarming life that lies under appear- ances, however, is of a different order alto- gether, and Robbe-Grillet's capacity for extremism and publicity should blind no one to this.
Butor is also a more gifted novelist than Robbe-Grillet, whose theories he has con- vincingly attacked. He is less confident than Robbe-Grillet in the capacity of mere tenses to 'get rid of time, and less philosophical; his scope is so much wider because he does not suffer from Robbe-Grillet's aggressive behaviourism.
Sturrock is probably most helpful of all on Claude Simon, although he does not say enough about this novelist's debt to
Faulkner. Simon. whose 'heavily-weighted . . . serpentine sentence—passes over reality
like a sponge, sucking it dry' (says Maurice Nadeau), is more obscure than Butor or Robbe-Grillet; here Sturrock is particularly valuable. His book is provocative, informa- tive and always sensible.
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