Against Interpretation (15 page)

This coming-of-age of the novel will entail a commitment to all sorts of questionable notions, like the idea of “progress” in the arts and the defiantly aggressive ideology expressed in the metaphor of the avant-garde. It will restrict the novel’s audience because it will demand accepting new pleasures—such as the pleasure of solving a problem—to be gotten from prose fiction and learning how to get them. (It may mean, for example, that we shall have to read aloud as well as with the eye, and it will certainly mean that we must expect to read a novel a number of times to understand it fully or to feel ourselves competent to judge it. We have already accepted this idea of repeated looking or hearing or reading with serious contemporary poetry, painting, sculpture, and music.) And it will make self-conscious aestheticians, didactic explorers, of all who wish seriously to practice the form. (All “modern” artists are aestheticians.) This surrender of the novel’s commitment to facileness, to easy availability and the perpetuation of an outmoded aesthetic, will undoubtedly give rise to a great many boring and pretentious books; and one may well come to wish the old unselfconsciousness back again. But the price must be paid. Readers must be made to see, by a new generation of critics who may well have to force this ungainly period of the novel down their throats by all sorts of seductive and partly fraudulent rhetoric, the necessity of this move. And the sooner the better.

For until we have a
continuous
serious “modern” tradition of the novel, venturesome novelists will work in a vacuum. (Whether critics will decide not to call these prose fictions novels any more doesn’t matter. Nomenclature has not proved an obstacle in painting or music or poetry, although it has in sculpture, so that we now tend to drop that word in favor of words like “construction” and “assemblage.”) We shall continue to have monstrous hulks, like abandoned tanks, lying about the landscape. An example, perhaps the greatest example, is
Finnegans Wake
—still largely unread and unreadable, left to the care of academic exegetes who may decipher the book for us, but cannot tell us why it should be read or what we can learn from it. That Joyce expected his readers to devote their whole lives to his book may seem an outrageous demand; but it is a logical one, considering the singularity of his work. And the fate of Joyce’s last book presages the obtuse reception of a number of its less mammoth but equally plotless successors in English—the books of Stein, Beckett, and Burroughs come to mind. No wonder these stand out, as stark isolated forays, on an eerily pacified battleground.

Lately, however, the situation appears to be changing. A whole school—should I say a battalion?—of important and challenging novels is being produced in France. There are actually two waves here. The earlier was led by Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Pierre Klossowski; most of these books were written in the 1940s and are as yet untranslated into English. Better known, and mostly translated, are a “second wave” of books written in the 1950s, by (among others) Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, and Nathalie Sarraute. All these writers—and they differ greatly from each other, in intention and achievement—have this in common: they reject the idea of the “novel” whose task is to tell a story and delineate characters according to the conventions of 19th century realism, and all they abjure is summed up in the notion of “psychology.” Whether they try to transcend psychology by Heidegger’s phenomenology (a powerful influence) or undercut it by behavioristic, external description, the results are at least negatively similar, and constitute the first body of work on the form of the novel which gives promise of telling us something useful about the new forms which fiction may take.

But perhaps the more valuable achievement to come out of France for the novel has been a whole body of criticism inspired by the new novelists (and, in some cases, written by them) which amounts to a most impressive attempt to think systematically about the genre. This criticism—I am thinking of essays by Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, E. M. Cioran, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Michel Foucault, and others—is, by far, the most interesting literary criticism today. And nothing prevents novelists in the English-speaking world from drawing sustenance from the brilliant reexamination of the premises of the novel expounded by these critics, but doing work in the novel very different from that of the French novelists. The reason these essays may prove more valuable than the novels is that they propose standards that are ampler and more ambitious than anything yet achieved by any writer. (Robbe-Grillet, for example, admits that his novels are inadequate illustrations of the diagnoses and recommendations put forth in his essays.)

This is, to me, the importance of the appearance in English of
The Age of Suspicion,
a collection of Nathalie Sarraute’s essays in which, ostensibly, the theory behind her novels is fully set forth.
11
Whether or not one enjoys or admires Sarraute’s novels (I really like only
Portrait of a Man Unknown
and
The Planetarium
), whether or not she really practices what she preaches (in a crucial respect, I think she does not), the essays broach a number of criticisms of the traditional novel which seem to me a good beginning for the theoretical reconsideration long overdue on this side of the Atlantic.

*   *   *

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.