Against Interpretation (16 page)

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

I
T 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 Its 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.

But Ionesco’s plays, it seems to me, need little explanation. If an account of his work is desired, Richard N. Coe’s excellent short book on Ionesco, published in 1961 in the English
Writers and Critics
series, offers a far more coherent and compact defense of the plays than anything in
Notes and Counter Notes.
The interest of Ionesco on Ionesco is not for its author’s theory of theater, but for what the book suggests about the puzzling thinness—puzzling considering their richness of theme—of Ionesco’s plays. The tone of the book tells a great deal. For behind the relentless egotism of Ionesco’s writings on the theater—the allusions to unending battles with obtuse critics and a bovine public—is an insistent, plaintive uneasiness. Ionesco protests, incessantly, that he has been misunderstood. Therefore, everything he says at one point in
Notes and Counter Notes,
he takes back on another page. (Though these writings span the years 1951–61, there is no development in the argument.) His plays are avant-garde theater; there is no such thing as avant-garde theater. He is writing social criticism; he is not writing social criticism. He is a humanist; he is morally and emotionally estranged from humanity. Throughout, he writes as a man sure—whatever you say of him, whatever he says of himself—that his true gifts are misunderstood.

What is Ionesco’s accomplishment? Judging by the most exacting standards, he has written one really remarkable and beautiful play, Jack, or the Submission (1950); one brilliant lesser work,
The Bald Soprano,
his first play (written 1948-49); and several effective short plays which are pungent reprises of the same material,
The Lesson
(1950),
The Chairs
(1951), and
The New Tenant
(1953). All these plays—Ionesco is a prolific writer—are “early” Ionesco. The later works are marred by a diffuseness in the dramatic purpose and an increasing, unwieldy self-consciousness. The diffuseness can be clearly seen in
Victims of Duty
(1952), a work with some powerful sections but unhappily overexplicit. Or one can compare his best play,
Jack,
with a short sequel using the same characters,
The Future Is in Eggs
(1951).
Jack
abounds with splendid harsh fantasy, ingenious and logical; it alone, of all Ionesco’s plays, gives us something up to the standard of Artaud: the Theater of Cruelty as Comedy. But in
The Future Is in Eggs,
Ionesco has embarked upon the disastrous course of his later writings, railing against “views” and tediously attributing to his characters a concern with the state of the theater, the nature of language, and so forth. Ionesco is an artist of considerable gifts who has been victimized by “ideas.” His work has become water-logged with them; his talents have coarsened. In
Notes and Counter Notes
we have a chunk of that endless labor of self-explication and self-vindication as a playwright and thinker which occupies the whole of his play,
Improvisation,
which dictates the intrusive remarks on playwriting in
Victims of Duty
and
Amédée,
which inspires the oversimplified critique of modern society in
The Killer
and
Rhinoceros.

Ionesco’s original artistic impulse was his discovery of the poetry of banality. His first play,
The Bald Soprano,
was written almost by accident, he says, after he discovered the Smiths and the Martins
en famille
in the Assimil phrase book he bought when he decided to study English. And all the subsequent plays of Ionesco continued at least to open with a volleying back and forth of clichés. By extension, the discovery of the poetry of cliché led to the discovery of the poetry of meaninglessness—the convertibility of all words into one another. (Thus, the litany of “
chat
” at the end of
Jack.
) It has been said that Ionesco’s early plays are “about” meaninglessness, or “about” non-communication. But this misses the important fact that in much of modern art one can no longer really speak of subject-matter in the old sense. Rather, the subject-matter is the technique. What Ionesco did—no mean feat—was to appropriate for the theater one of the great technical discoveries of modern poetry: that all language can be considered from the outside, as by a stranger. Ionesco disclosed the
dramatic
resources of this attitude, long known but hitherto confined to modern poetry. His early plays are not “about” meaninglessness. They are attempts to use meaninglessness theatrically.