Synthesizing Beckett and the Nouveau Roman

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SYNTHESIZING BECKETT AND THE NOUVEAU ROMAN:

TOWARD A BETTER UNDERSTANDING

Jennifer L. O‘Neil

A thesis submitted to

Sonoma State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

English

______

Professor J.J. Wilson, English, Chair

______

Professor Christine Renaudin, French

May 2, 2003

By Jennifer L. O‘Neil

AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION

OF MASTER'S THESIS

I grant permission for the reproduction of parts of this thesis without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorb the cost and provide proper acknowledgment of authorship.

May 2, 2003 Date

______Signature

iii SYNTHESIZING BECKETT AND THE NOUVEAU ROMAN: TOWARD A BETTER UNDERSTANDING

Thesis by Jennifer L. O‘Neil

ABSTRACT

In the 1950‘s and later, Samuel Beckett was characterized by some critics as a perpetrator of the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel. This does not happen today. The purpose of this study is to decipher the reasons why this claim was made. Was Beckett truly writing what was known as the anti-novel?

By comparing the novels of several writers known to be Nouveaux Romanciers, specifically Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor, to the novels that Beckett wrote at the same time and place I hope to decide once and for all whether Beckett deserves to be numbered among these writers. First, I will explore the theoretical underpinnings of the Nouveau Roman alongside Beckett‘s critical ideas; then I will take a look at the novels themselves to see how they are indeed newly contrived.

After studying these four writers side by side, I have concluded that Beckett was indeed partaking of a similar spirit in crafting his Trilogy. His novels written in the late 1940‘s and early 1950‘s have characteristics similar to the Nouveau Roman, especially in regards to form and content. In addition, all four writers were proceeding from the same Modernist influences and moving toward a Postmodern aesthetic. The Nouveaux Romanciers themselves were varied enough in their techniques to allow inclusion of others into their amorphous group, including Samuel Beckett. All of these writers similarly branched out into other genres and even other mediums after their time as novelists. Many never returned to attempt the full novel form again.

Chair:

______Signature

MA Program: English May 2, 2003 Sonoma State Univeristy Date

iv ACKNOWELDGMENTS

It is only with the help of many that this thesis came to be.

Many thanks to my Committee. J.J., you were my rock through all of this, giving me more guidance and encouragement than you will ever know. I am proud to be your last Master‘s Student. Christine, you are one of the best literature teachers I have ever met, even if you do usually teach in another language.

Special thanks to Scott Miller, the best cheerleader in the world of thesis making.

Many heartfelt thanks to my Family, Friends, and Coworkers. To all who listened to me whinge for two years, and still could hardly wait to be excited to see me finish. You are too many to name, but rest assured that I know who each and every one of you are.

Finally, two most important acknowledgements:

To my darling husband Charlie, who let me cavort with living and dead writers for hours on end without ever once being jealous

And

This thesis is offered in Memory of my Mother, Angie. Love you always, miss you forever.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………… 7 In which purpose of study is discussed and basic connections are illustrated

PART ONE: BACKGROUND……………………………………………………. 18

CHAPTER 1 THEORY………………………………………………….. 21 In which the theoretical ideas behind the novels are explored.

PART TWO: INVESTIGATION………………………………………………… 45

CHAPTER 2 CHARACTERIZATION………………………………….. 47 In which aspects of character and point of view are compared and contrasted

CHAPTER 3 NARRATIVE………………………………..…………… 77 In which aspects of narrative construction, including plot, style, and structure are examined.

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………. 104 In which deductions are made and everything is tied up with a very pretty bow.

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………..……………………………… 105

vi 7

INTRODUCTION

The first graduate class I ever took was a Modernism seminar. Instead of offering the usual Joyce, Woolf, Eliot class my instructor, J.J. Wilson, decided to try something new. Joyce, Woolf, Beckett was a combo that could not be beat for thrills and chills. I had no idea at that time what a significant substitution this would prove to be, for me, on a personal level. I mean, Eliot is alright, but what inquiring mind could stand up to the Irish humor and existential angst that is

Samuel Beckett? Mine definitely couldn‘t. I fell for Mr. Beckett, and I fell hard.

Three or four long years later, after many a Beckett discussion with J.J. and others, after already deciding to write this thesis on Beckett, I came to the realization that I needed to find some way into the great grandiose subject that is

Beckett. Let‘s face it, the critical gristmill has been grinding out studies on Mr. B. ever since it became impossible to ignore him some fifty years ago. How was I going to find something relatively new to write about him, after all that time?

How was I going to find that one little hook that no one, or rather relatively few, had noticed? This is where I started to get a little nervous about my future success.

I don‘t know where I first came upon the term Nouveau Roman. I had no idea during my career as an English major, and as a slapdash Francophile reader, that there were any such innovative individuals writing in France at the same time Beckett was. I had been distracted by the Theater of the Absurd, its implications and the wealth of resources on the subject. But when I got right down to it, Theater of the Absurd was just as grandiose a subject as Beckett, and one as impenetrable. I guess you could say I was flailing at that point, with

Beckett in one hand and Martin Esslin‘s wonderful book in the other.

I started grabbing any article I could find, in hopes of nailing down a focus for this project. It was around this time that I began to notice this term that was coming up quite often in relation to Beckett: Nouveau Roman, and I had to wonder what that was. What I found was truly interesting. There exists an amorphous group of writers writing something called the New Novel in France right around the same time Beckett was writing his magnum opuses in French.

Bingo! Add to this the fact that critics of the time often lumped Mr. B. in with the

Nouveau Romanciers, which they never do today, and you will begin to understand my delight. Who were these guys and why was Beckett associated with them for however little time? These questions seemed viable topics in my mind for a thesis length study.

As I began to take an active interest in this new tangent, I found there were about six or eight writers who were considered to be part of the Nouveau

Roman group. That seemed like an awful lot of extra reading to me, so I

9 identified a core group, those that were most often mentioned as Nouveaux

Romanciers. These three include Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and

Michel Butor. I believe this will prove to be a good representative sample, as no two of the Nouveaux Romanciers are the same, in style or in temperament.

In pursuing leads on this topic, I found many articles that mention Beckett in relation to the Nouveau Roman. In the first place, Beckett was included in a few special issues which two journals offered in an attempt to tell their reading public who was writing the Nouveau Roman. In 1958, the Esprit special issue included him with nine other writers, some of whom, like Beckett, are no longer included on the Nouveau Roman roster. Beckett is featured in the Yale French

Studies special issue ―Midnight Novelists and others,‖ which came out in 1958 as well, and which I will talk about a little later. There are also many books and journal articles which include Beckett in more specific relation to the Nouveau

Roman. Some articles were misleading, su ch as Christine Brooke-Rose‘s ―Samuel

Beckett and the Anti-Novel,‖ which did discuss how Beckett was writing the anti-novel but did not place it in any context (i.e. it didn‘t mention any of the other writers). Others were more skewed toward being beneficial for this project. Marcel Thiebaut‘s 1958 article in La Revue de Paris, ―Le Nouveau

Roman,‖ talks about Beckett right beside Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Butor! In

1960, Melvin J. Friedman published his article ―Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau

Roman‖ in Wisconsin Studies of Contemporary Literature. This is the paramount article, which places Beckett smack dab in the continuum of French Literature

10 and right in the mix with Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Butor. In Lois

Oppenheim‘s book Three Decades of the French New Novel, which collects the proceedings of the 1982 colloquium on the Nouveau Roman held at New York

University, Beckett is mentioned in a unique relationship to Robbe-Grillet in the speech given by Barney Rosset, Beckett‘s American publisher at Grove Press. He states that he found Robbe-Grillet through Beckett and that, in effect, the desire to publish Waiting for Godot led him to France, and thus to Robbe-Grillet.

Ultimately Grove ―worked assiduously to make Robbe-Grillet known to

American readers‖ (57). From this anecdote we can infer that Rosset places

Beckett only a little ahead of the Nouveau Roman, almost shoulder to shoulder.

There are also many cases when Beckett is figured as a precursor to the

Nouveau Roman, instead of a contemporary. As would be expected, this is particularly true in later studies. In Vivian Mercier‘s 1971 book The New Novel:

From Queneau to Pinget, Beckett is discussed in the introduction under the heading ―Some precursors: ‗Kafka, Beckett, Roussel.‘‖ 1 Even Robbe-Grillet calls

Beckett a predecessor in his For a New Novel. In an attempt to counter the perceived claims that the writers of the Nouveau Roman are trying to erase all ties with the past, he writes, ―…since then the evolution has become increasingly evident: Flaubert, Dostoevski, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett …Far from making a tabula rasa of the past, we have most readily reached an agreement on the names of our predecessors; and our ambition is merely to continue them‖

(136)2.

With the diversity of opinions stated above in mind, it is high time to state firmly that I am not pursuing this study to prove any kind of influence between

Beckett and the Nouveaux Romanciers. I would rather hope to explore how other writers besides Beckett were being influenced by the spirit of the time, the zeitgeist that was Paris before and after World War II. I am most interested in what we can learn from setting the works of these writers side by side, from looking at how they each came up with a new way to fashion the novel.

In this vein, it seems significant to me that the term Nouveau Roman was pasted on a loose knit group, that, in fact, none of these writers were doing the novel the same way. Ihab Hassan writes that the Nouveaux Romanciers were

―coerced for easy reference into a school‖ (167), which speaks to how the term was put upon them, rather than fashioned from inside the group.3 I would be remiss if I didn‘t point out that even the Nouveaux Romanciers themselves have been vociferous dissenters when it comes to this label. In his 1963 essay ―The

Use of Theory,‖ which serves as a sort of introduction to his For a New Novel,

Robbe-Grillet writes, ―If in many of the pages that follow, I readily employ the term New Novel, it is not to designate a school, nor even a specific and constituted group of writers working in the same direction…‖ (9). John Sturrock elaborates on this point. He writes that the Nouveaux Romanciers

…have protested that their so-called ‗movement‘, like all such literary groupings, was an invention partly of harrassed critics, seeking to impose order in the chaos of contemporary writing or to dismiss the divergent trends of avant-garde writing conveniently as a single entity, and partly of their less scrupulous followers, the literary publicists: reviewers, journalists, and other commentators,

who certainly enjoy more outlets in France for their ideological or hierarchical assessments of the current artistic scene than they do in any other country.‖ (1)

Babcock, in his introduction to his The New Novel in France, states that some feel the term Nouveau Roman was a publicity campaign put on by the publisher, Les

Editions de Minuit, who of course published all of the writers we are concerned with here (3). Looking back it does not seem to matter how many factions rebelled against the term Nouveau Roman, or felt that the group did not comprise a cohesive school. The fact is, the term stuck, and today you will still find at the very least three or four writers associated with it.

If the New Novel wasn‘t the only thing new at the time, it makes sense to look at what was going on with this particular literary form in the milieu that was post WWII French literature. Whether precursor or active member, Beckett was there right along with Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Butor. With this proximity in mind it will be interesting to see what that means to the novel, what actually was new about any number of novels written contemporaneously.

While Beckett was clearly not a member of this group , he did have some dealings with our other writers. As I mentioned above, Beckett is included in the

Yale French Studies 1958 special issue entitled ―Midnight Novelists and others.‖

There is a blip in the introductory matters of this issue that reads: "Midnight

Novelists? Oh, yes. Quite simply, because a number of the writer's discussed most frequently in recent years are or have been published by the Editions de

Minuit: Beckett, Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute..." Babcock comments: ―The Yale

French Studies issue was entitled ―Midnight Novelists,‖ in recognition of the central role played in the New Novel by Jérôme Lindon‘s publishing house, Les

Editions de Minuit, so called because it had begun as a clandestine publishing operation during the German occupation of France during World War II. Most of the new novelists were published by this press, even those whose first books were published elsewhere‖ (1). This relationship may be more significant than one might think because, while Beckett is known to be reclusive in his associations with most other writers, he is clearly associated with the Nouveau

Roman because of his publishing house. In his biography of Beckett, The Last

Modernist, Anthony Cronin writes: ―Beckett certainly did not disdain the overtures or acknowledgements of influence which emanated from this group.

Partly to please Jérôme Lindon he sometimes went to their launchings and other public appearances. In 1959 he allowed himself to be photographed with a group which included Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, and Nathalie

Sarraute‖ (424).

Evidence shows that Beckett knew Nathalie Sarraute before they ever shared a publisher. The story goes that in May, 1945 when members of the

Resistance were fleeing Paris, Beckett and his wife Suzanne stayed with Nathalie

Sarraute and her family for a long ten days in the very cramped quarters of a gardener‘s cottage. Sarraute‘s husband was in a different Resistance cell, and perhaps this is why they took in two more even though they were already housing two of their own children, a young Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis, as

14 well as Nathalie Sarraute‘s mother. According to Knowlson‘s account in Damned to Fame, the Becketts did not get along too well with their roommates:

Conditions in the house were fairly primitive. There was running water only in the kitchen; consequently, everyone had to carry large jugs of water and wash in large bowls in their rooms. The lavatory was at the bottom of the garden, and to avoid a nocturnal expedition to what was known in the family as ―la punition du Ciel‖ (―the punishment of the gods‖), chamber pots were much in demand. One problem was that both Beckett and Suzanne were extremely late risers. So Beckett used to wander through the kitchen at about one o‘clock with a chamber pot in his hand, just as the others were sitting down to lunch. The fact that he did this every day irritated Nathalie Sarraute‘s mother, who considered their guests to be very badly brought up indeed. ―Here comes the madman,‖ she would comment aloud to her daughter in Russian, as Beckett crept silently and sheepishly through the kitchen. (289)

Knowlson also reports that Beckett and Sarraute did not get along for reasons of their own. On top of his aberrant behavior, she did not feel he was sufficiently grateful for what the Sarrautes were doing for them. He writes ―she considered

Beckett much too arrogant to feel that he bore any obligation toward anyone‖

(290). Knowlson goes one step further, conjecturing that there might have been some professional jealousy involved, as Beckett praised the work of Simone de

Beauvoir, but apparently had never read any of Sarraute‘s work 4.

Robbe-Grillet‘s interaction with Beckett was on a much more literary level

(and a much more hospitable level, too). Not only did he consider Beckett to be one of his predecessors, he also considered him to be worthy of study. In 1953 he wrote a review of En Attendant Godot (the play was published by Les Editions de

Minuit, of course) for the magazine Critique, entitled ―Samuel Beckett, Auteur

Dramatique.‖ This essay shows up again, with significant revision, in For a New

Novel, under the title ―Samuel Beckett, or Presence on the Stage.‖ In this later version written in 1957, Robbe-Grillet has prefaced his essay with a mention of

Heidigger and discusses, in brief, Beckett‘s novels; he has dropped a section mentioning Ionesco, and the brief nod to Roger Blin, and has replaced the final summation which originally included proclamations on Beckett‘s oeuvre with an added section on Endgame. It is surprising how clearly one can see in this short essay just how much of Beckett‘s work Robbe-Grillet is familiar with.

Beckett makes another appearance in For a New Novel in the essay ―On

Several Obsolete Notions.‖ In a discussion of the evolution of the novel, in general, and plot in particular, Beckett is featured in the company of some biggies in the sentence, ―The demands of the anecdote are doubtless less constraining for Proust than for Flaubert, for Faulkner than for Proust, for

Beckett than for Faulkner…‖ (33). The progression featured here is clearly chronological, yet I must once again highlight the final proximity of Beckett to

Robbe-Grillet‘s own time and place.

At the very least we know that Michel Butor, the younger brother to our other writers in many respects, read Beckett, because Leon Roudiez reports that after reading Molloy, Butor sought out a friend at Les Editions de Minuit in hopes that the publisher would find in Butor a like-minded writer and publish his work (6). It must have worked, because we know that Butor‘s works were published there.

This thesis will appear in two parts: Background and Investigation.

Background refers to the theoretical concepts of each author, while the

Investigation section will be a close reading of the works in question. I will be treating each author separately, although the Nouveau Roman will be still be considered as a group while the Nouveaux Romanciers will be referred to as a group. The Nouveaux Romanciers will be discussed first with Beckett following.

Each of these authors has been prolific in the amount of works they have put out.

They have all spanned eras and genres. For the sake of the Investigation portion of this study, I have confined myself, for the most part, to works that are in the novel form and works that were published roughly between 1945 and 1955.

1 Vivian Mercier kindly points out that both Robbe-Grillet and Butor have written on

Roussel, (Robbe-Grillet‘s 1963 essay appears in For a New Novel, while Butor‘s much earlier essay, circa 1950, is printed in Répetoire) although she characterizes him as

―virtually unknown to English-speaking readers‖ (18).

2 It is interesting to note the truly international flavor of Robbe-Grillet‘s list of authors.

He clearly does not see any borders to the continuum that leads up to his contem porary literature.

3 This is also what we hear many times in reference to the main group Beckett is associated with, the Theatre of the Absurd. Many believe that Esslin might have been overstating the similarities between Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, and the others, which is a grand topic for another thesis.

4 Let‘s not be too harsh in our judgement of Beckett concerning this fact: Ms. Sarraute had only published one work, Tropisms, at this time, and it was not widely known.

PART ONE: BACKGROUND

The background that I am most concerned with here is the theoretical background that has influenced the works of these writers. But there are two more aspects of background that must be at least fleetingly mentioned to place our writers in a context. The first is the cultural background of France directly after World War II and the second is the literary background which leads up to our particular writers in France.

The time in which all of these novels were written includes the aftermath of the Second World War. All of our writers experienced the War in France in some way. For example, Alain Robbe-Grillet was exported to Germany, along with many a young French person, to work in a German factory. Nathalie

Sarraute‘s husband was in a Resistance Cell, as we learned in the Introduction, which caused them to have to flee Paris. Her tale goes on to include the fact that after the Becketts left them, Sarraute was forced to go into deeper hiding and ended up going by an assumed name and posing as the Governess of her own children. Michel Butor was still in school at the time, and perhaps had the easiest time of all but he also gives us this most moving description:

In 1940 the French were crushed. For awhile there was a ―free‖ zone, and then that too was taken over. After long years of blackout, liberation came from the outside. Certainly there was the Resistance, but it was quite evident that it alone could not have

produced the Liberation. Some conducted themselves heroically, but they were there to bring as large a component of French as possible into this Liberation, which had come from outside. So the French experienced this war in a very painful way. The moment the war was over, those who had truly been involved, those who had been soldiers in 1939 and 1940, especially if they had been prisoners, deported, had only one wish, which was to forget those years, to act as if a horrible parenthesis was finally closed and that they were back in 1939, or, even better, in 1937. They did all they could to put an end to this evil chapter and act as if they were back in prewar days. (Improvisations 16-17)

There is no doubt that Butor has an understanding of the effect of the war on the

French people as a whole, even though he was not as compromised as Robbe-

Grillet or Sarraute. Beckett worked for the French Resistance and was lucky to escape Paris with his life. Know lson reports that some fifty other members of his cell were arrested and executed by the Nazis. He fled to Rousselon and spent a bucolic few years there gearing up for his most prolific writing period. Clearly, we would not be mistaken to suppose that all four of our writers were influenced in a similar way by the War and by the Nazi occupation of France, which is in direct line with the Modernist experiences of the First World War.

The second sort of background we might be concerned with here is the

French literary background. Let‘s consider the cutoff for our background to be the French Revolution. So from the Revolution to the Nouveau Roman the list would read something like this: Hugo, Balzac, Stendahl, Flaubert, Zola, Proust,

Camus, Sartre. This is a sweeping glance at the biggest names in the genre of the novel. Some of these names will be present in the following chapters, especially

Balzac, and Proust. The Nouveaux Romanciers were reacting most strongly

20 against the realism of the former, and trying to incorporate, to some degree, the innovations of the latter. The buzzwords for this time in the evolution of the novel are such concepts as reality and consciousness, and how best to portray them in fiction. The realism of the Nineteenth Century, embodied in Balzac, is one of the most obvious points of contention that our Nouveaux Romanciers experience. Balzac is the biggest hobgoblin from the past, at least for our

Nouveaux Romanciers, while Beckett‘s longest critical work is on Proust.

There are other literary names that were important to our Romanciers.

These include Joyce, Kafka, Woolf, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, to name a few. As we will see, our writers were reading these authors, and even writing essays on them. Yet they are also writing fine essays on the theory of the novel, which is what our first chapter focuses on.

CHAPTER ONE: THEORY

The great interest shown today in discussions of the novel, and especially in the theories advanced by the supporters of what, in France at present, is called the ―Nouveau Roman,‖ has led many to imagine that these theorizing novelists are cool calculators who began by constructing their theories, which they then decided to put into practice in their books. This explains the fact that their novels have been referred to as ―laboratory experiments.‖ (Tropisms v)

As shown in Sarraute‘s quote above, theory played a very big part in the

Nouveau Roman movement. A good number of the writers, especially the three we are concerned with here, made a point of writing essays on the current state of the novel and their own ideas of the theory behind it. Fortunately for us, some even published books on the subject. It is necessary to take a closer look at what was going on behind the novels we are concerned with here to even begin to understand what was produced by the proponents of these theories.

The Reluctant Theorist

Robbe-Grillet was most definitely a reluctant theorist. The first sentence of his book of essays on the novel, For a New Novel, reads ―I am not a theoretician of the novel‖ (7). Indeed, Robbe-Grillet wrote many of these essays in response

22 to those who criticized his works with undue harshness. Babcock writes ―Robbe-

Grillet, for example, has often said that he set out to write novels, not to formulate theory, and that his subsequent role as a theorist was thrust on him when he discovered to his dismay that in the mind of his critics, his creative work violated the ‗rules‘ of novelistic composition. Only then did he attempt to explain himself in theoretical terms.‖ (9) This attitude is characteristic of many writers, who shy away from trying to explain the whys and wherefores of their creations. Rather blame the muse than try to get them pinned down to one method or another. It took a request by the magazine L’Esprit, which he calls a

―politico-literary newspaper‖ (For a New Novel 8), to motivate Robbe-Grillet to compose a series of articles in 1955 and 1956; in 1965 these were collected with other later essays into the volume entitled For a New Novel.

It makes for a strange brand of theory when it is formulated in answer to unfavorable criticism. Toward the end of the essay that begins with the sentence quoted above, Robbe-Grillet writes:

The novelist‘s critical consciousness can be useful to him only on the level of choices, not on that of their justification. He feels the necessity of using a certain form, of rejecting a certain adjective, of constructing this paragraph in a certain way…But of necessity he can produce no proof (except, occasionally, after the fact). He implores us to believe him, to trust him. And when we ask him why he has written his book, he has only one answer: ―To try and find out why I wanted to write it.‖ (For a New Novel 14)

Obviously, Robbe-Grillet‘s cries to be believed must have fallen on deaf ears, if his essays are any proof. His entire critical œuvre seems at times a plaintive defense against his critics and an attempt at the justification he denounces above.

Yet the same harsh criticism lead Robbe-Grillet to construct a viable continuum linking the writing of his own time to the literature of the past and anticipating a future for the novel. In justifying his own works‘ place in that continuum,

Robbe-Grillet fashioned a theory that situates the Nouveau Roman in the literary history of both France and the larger world. Let‘s take a look at just how he did that.

The single most important belief behind all Robbe-Grillet‘s critical writings is the idea that ―the relationship between human beings and the world has changed since the middle of the nineteenth century, and that critical assumptions of the 1950s fail to take that fact into account‖ (Babcock 11). The change that Babcock speaks of takes place for Robbe-Grillet precisely within literature itself, for the relationship between man and the world is displayed in the crafting of novels. In his speech at the 1982 colloquium on the Nouveau

Roman held at New York University, Robbe-Grillet explains what I think he was trying to get across in his essays from the ‗50s and ‗60s. He states, ―All novels of the nineteenth-century, and later, those of the twentieth-century which followed in their footsteps, manifested a hiatus between the narrator‘s speech and the characters‘ consciousness‖ (―Robbe-Grillet‖ 22). This differentiation between the narrator and the character is fundamental to all Robbe-Grillet‘s theory. He goes on to say:

It was as if in Balzac or Zola, as well as in a lot of others, the novelist had to render an account of something that was a ch ange in the world. This change in the world was a splitting apart, a fragmentation: there were cracks in the world, there were rifts, and

the fragmentation of the world went so deep as to touch the characters‘ very consciousness. Fragmentation, scattering, dissemination, these were the evils of which the characters suffered, so to speak, it was the calm voice of the novelist which recounted these difficulties, these sufferings… (22)

The novels of the nineteenth century displayed flawed characters moving through a world that is at once controlled and sensible. The story told by the narrator would not include the fragmentation that the character would be all too aware of. ―The divorce between the characters‘ situation in the world and the writer‘s account of this situation is quite remarkable, for the novel is a game which both disturbs, for a considerable number of pages, and reassures, particularly at the end since, in the last analysis, if the novelist can be a coherent voice, it is precisely that the w orld itself is just, that God exists, and so on.‖

(―Alain Robbe-Grillet‖ 23) In the traditional novel it is the narrator‘s job to, in effect, neatly sew up all loose ends and bring the reader satisfaction by finishing with a world set to rights. The characters who cause the disturbance must be dealt with in the final dénouement, then the story is brought to a believable closure, and the author is lauded for his skill in mastering the novel form.

It is this conventional pattern that Robbe-Grillet felt was seen by many as signifying the ‗true novel‘ In his essay ―New Novel, New Man,‖ Robbe-Grillet writes: ―the error is to suppose that the ‗true novel‘ was set once and for all in the Balzacian period, with strict and definitive rules‖ (For a New Novel 135-36).

The rules that Robbe-Grillet speaks of must include all those that he and his fellow writers are breaking: traditional characterization, narrative and plot

25 formation, psychological and sociological studies in fiction, etc. The realism practiced in the nineteenth century could no longer be respected in the modern era. Robbe-Grillet felt the paradox of the fragmented characters suffering and dying in a meaningful world could not continue to represent, in an honest fashion, the state of mankind and the universe. To offer an omniscient narrator to the modern reader as a realistic device would be an inaccurate representation of reality.

An interesting example of a nineteenth-century writer trying to smooth over the world he has created in order to satisfy his reader‘s sense of well being comes from Robbe-Grillet himself in the 1950‘s. When his novel Jealousy was published, Robbe-Grillet had the publishers put a small quote on the cover. It read: ―The narrator of this story: a husband keeping watch on his wife‖ and it was signed ―The Editors.‖ He did so, apparently, to help those more reluctant readers find a way into his nontraditional and challenging story. An angry letter written to the editors by critic Maurice Blanchot 1, stated ―that it was shameful to limit the scope of the book so stupidly,‖ and that it was not a jealous husband narrating the novel but, ―a pure anonymous presence‖ (―Alain Robbe-Grillet‖

26). At the 1982 colloquium Robbe-Grillet recalls, ―what was disturbing in this affair? It was that I myself had written that blurb and thus, to a degree, I myself was a nineteenth-century novelist who had made clear and coherent a world of uncertainties, of struggles, and of contradictions‖ (―Alain Robbe-Grillet‖ 26). He goes on to tell us that he was profoundly affected by this experience, as it

26 brought to him a new understanding. The ideologies of those late, great French writers whom he was trying so hard to distance himself from, were ideologies that existed within him, too, as he was a part of the same literary tradition that produced them. He writes, ―the ideology of the society in which I live is not in front of me, as though I would write New Novels fallen from heaven into a world refusing of them. No, not at all! The ideology is in me, too, and consequently this longing for order and coherence, this struggle against incoherence, exists in me as well and probably, therefore, in my text, too‖ (―Alain

Robbe-Grillet‖ 26).

The Determined Theorist

There can be no doubt that understanding Nathalie Sarraute‘s theory is essential to the comprehension of all her novels. I speak of what Ms. Sarraute has termed tropisms, which are basically subtle interior emotional occurrences which take place within all of us 2. She states that she called them tropisms because ―I thought that this title would render rather well the instinctive, irrepressible aspect of these inner movements, generally provoked, like those of plants, by an exterior excitement, by the presence of someone or some object‖

(―Nathalie Sarraute‖ 122-123). In the preface to Tropisms3 she goes on to say:

These movements, of which we are hardly cognizant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak, the feelings we manifest, are aware of experiencing, and able to define. They seemed, and still seem to me to constitute the secret source of our existence, in what might be called its nascent state. vi

For Sarraute the ―emotional stirrings‖ are shown not in our subconscious which can be accessed by our minds, but in the unconscious which is known by us only in dreams, namely, out of our conscious control4. Tropisms are not our thoughts, nor our emotions themselves, but something deeper. She goes on in the same introduction to state:

And since, while we are performing them, no words express them, not even those of the interior monologue––for they develop and pass through us very rapidly in the form of frequently very sharp, brief sensations, without our perceiving clearly what they are––it

was not possible to communicate them to the reader otherwise than by means of equivalent images that would make him experience analogous sensations. (Sarraute Tropisms vi-vii)

Here we get the sense that it has been the desire to map these inner movements which has shaped the writings of Sarraute all along. It is this desire which subsumes Sarraute‘s need for plot and informs her use of point of view and description. As we will soon see, it caused her to use a special brand of stream of consciousness, a unique subjective point of view which gives a strangely interior perspective to her works. And she does all this while avoiding psychological terms and almost all exterior description (something that at least one other

Nouveau Romancier, Robbe-Grillet, made quite a point of as we will see). As I mentioned earlier, Tropisms is the title of Sarraute‘s first published work. It is not a novel, but rather a series of short vignettes designed only to illustrate these hidden sensations. For example, one of the shortest, number XVIII, is less than one page long:

On the outskirts of London, in a little cottage with percale curtains, its little back lawn sunny and all wet with rain. The big, wisteria-framed window in the studio, opens on to this lawn. A cat with its eyes closed, is seated quite erect on the warm stone. A spinster lady with white hair, and pink cheeks that tend towards purple, is reading an English magazine in front of the door. She sits there, very stiff, very dignified, quite sure of herself and of others, firmly settled in her little universe. She knows that in a few moments the bell will ring for tea. Down below, the cook, Ada, is cleaning vegetables at a table covered with white oilcloth. Her face is motionless, she appears to be thinking of nothing. She knows that it will soon be time to toast the buns, and ring the bell for tea. (Sarraute Tropisms 45)

In this passage, we are treated to a curiously exterior scene, curious because of the degree of interiority we will be treated to in Sarraute‘s novels. The description of the garden, sunny and yet wet, anticipates the dichotomy of the inhabitants of the house. The two women are situated worlds apart: the lady of the house above stairs reading a magazine, at her leisure, and the domestic downstairs working. The greater amount of description is given to the lady; we know her hair color, her demeanor, and her state of mind. In contrast, we are given only the cook‘s actions, her blank attitude and a hint at her blank thoughts.

It is interesting that we know her name. And, despite their differences, they both experience the same tension which arises from the anticipation of the ringing bell. In this way Sarraute shows how they are tied to one another, how neither role is given supremacy as they both depend on the same outside stimulus.

We must keep in mind that this is a very early example of a tropism. It was written before 1941. I bring this up to account for the exterior perspective of my example above, which is in direct contrast to the highly interior perspective that we will see in Sarraute‘s novels. For the novels are the continuation of the undertaking that began with the short texts in Tropisms. In 1963, long after her principal novels were completed, Sarraute wrote:

Tropisms are still the living substance of all my books, the only difference being that the (viii) time of the dramatic action they constitute is longer, and there is added complexity in the constant play that takes place between them and the appearances and commonplaces with which they emerge into the open: our conversations, the personality we seem to have, the person we seem to be in another‘s eyes, the stereotyped things we believe w e feel, as also those we discover in others, and the superficial

dramatic action constituted by plot, which is nothing but a conventional code that we apply to life. (Sarraute Tropisms ix)

The depth at which these stirrings lie is apparent in this quote: they are below our conversation, below our self perception, below our beliefs and feelings. Yet these are the very things which bring the tropisms to light. . The word

―commonplaces‖ occurs quite often in Sarraute‘s writings, and it, too, seems to be a buzzword for the emotional gymnastics. It is also interesting to see Ms.

Sarraute‘s strong feelings about plot, and even character.

Tropisms also play a part in Sarraute‘s literary criticism. In her collection of essays, entitled The Age of Suspicion, Sarraute deals with the writings of

Dostoyevsky. Just after discussing a scene in The Brothers Karamozov, Sarraute writes:

All of these strange contortions…all of these disordered leapings and grimacings, are the absolutely precise, outward manifestation, reproduced without indulgence or desire to please, the way the magnetic needle of a galvanometer gives amplified tracings of the minutest variations of a current, of those subtle, barely perceptible, fleeting, contradictory, evanescent movements, faint tremblings, ghosts of timid appeals and recoilings, pale shadows that flit by, whose unceasing play constitutes the invisible woof of all human relationships and the very substance of our lives (Sarraute Age 29).

This article, originally published in 1947, contains much of the language Sarraute employs when talking about tropisms, although she never once uses the term, itself. The word ―movements‖ is an obvious signal, but the adjectives also support the idea of tropisms; ―subtle‖ ―contradictory,‖ ―evanescent,‖ ―faint,‖

―timid,‖ ―pale,‖ all point to the inner stirrings, as do the words ―barely

31 perceptible,‖ ―flit,‖ ―ghosts,‖ ―tremblings.‖ The ideas of ―the invisible woof of all human relationships‖ and ―the very substance of our lives‖ are reminiscent of

―the secret source of our existence‖ we saw above. Sarraute goes on in the next paragraph to compliment Dostoyevsky when she states that he would have been able to ―seize these movements at their source, thus avoiding all these incredible gesticulations‖ if he had had modern techniques with which to compose his works.

In the 1956 article ―Conversation and Sub-conversation,‖ Sarraute discusses what the reader has gained from reading the Modernists. She writes,

He wanted to look even further or, if one prefers, even closer. And he was not long in perceiving what is hidden beneath the interior monologue: an immense profusion of sensations, images, sentiments, memories, impulses, little larval actions that no inner language can convey, that jostle one another on the threshold of consciousness, gather together in compact groups and loom up all of a sudden, then immediately fall apart, combine otherwise and reappear in new forms… (Sarraute Age 91-92).

Sarraute clearly sees the formulations so important to her in the interior monologue made famous by her immediate predecessors. The ―larval actions that no inner language can convey‖ echoes Ms. Sarraute‘s earlier assurance that no language, (not even that of interior monologue!) can illustrate her tropisms.

And the belief that the reader can be enticed into feeling the tropisms through like images and sensations is one we have definitely heard before.

The Prolific Theorist

Michel Butor is our most prolific critic. He has written criticism concerned with literature as well as essays about art and music. His work Répertoire spans five volumes and consists of essays on everything from Proust and Picasso to

Mondrian and Jackson Pollock to Fourier and Flaubert5. In his earliest literary criticism, Butor has much in common with our other Nouveaux Romanciers. He is concerned with the traditional versus the ―new,‖ with plot, and with characterization. Like Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, Butor likes to talk about

Balzac. He also writes about narrative time and space and Butor has a special idea about the novel and reality. He is definitely the younger brother to Robbe-

Grillet and Sarraute. I don‘t mean to imply that Butor‘s ideas about the novel are either naïve or immature, but rather that his criticism has a more complete feeling because of the work of his elder siblings.

The first thing on the mind of our Romanciers is always the traditional novel, and how they are not writing it. The first sentence of his essay ―Balzac and Reality‖ reads ―I take particular pleasure in speaking of Balzac, since he is generally used as a sort of bogey to intimidate any attempt at innovation, at invention in the contemporary novel‖ (Butor Inventory 100). Here we find the old harbinger of the traditional popping his head up once again. For Butor the struggle to stave off those who believe there is only one true novel is just as

33 immediate in 1960 as it was for the others in the 1950s. Butor goes about it, as we would expect, in a slightly different way.

In his essay ―The Novel as Research‖ Butor talks about the relationship between reality and imagination. It is his belief that the novel has the power to shape our consciousness. Butor states that the novel is only one form of narrative; we are surrounded by multitudes of narratives from our birth to our death. He distinguishes between the real narratives of our daily life, and those imaginary ones that fiction adds. He writes:

Among all these narratives by which a large share of our daily world is constituted, there may be some which are deliberately invented. If, in order to avoid any misunderstanding, we assign to the events which are recounted to us certain characteristics which immediately distinguish them from those we usually see with our own eyes, we are dealing with a literature of fantasy, myths, tales, and so on. The novelist, on the other had, presents us with events that resemble everyday events; he wants to give them as much as possible the appearance of reality… (Butor Inventory 27)

The novel, for Butor, holds a special responsibility because it mimics reality, and while its events cannot be verified like those that are truly real, it is exactly because it is a created reality that the novel is so important. ―Even though veracious narrative always has the sup port, the last resort, of external evidence, the novel must suffice to create what it tells us. That is why it is the phenomenological realm par excellence, the best possible place to study how reality appears to us, or might appear; that is why the novel is the laboratory of narrative‖ (Butor Inventory 27). The novel gives us access to a place where we can try on reality, where we can study the world from a perspective that is closer

34 than we can get to our real life and is also static enough to be gone over as often as we like. The reader can see certain things in the characters and situations of a novel which can then be applied to the real characters and events in the reader‘s life. Butor writes: ―The emergence of these fictions corresponds to a need, fulfills a function. Imaginary characters fill the gaps in reality and enlighten us about it‖

(Butor Inventory 29). In this way the reader can gain a deeper understanding of the world through fiction.

It is easy to see how this belief adds a dimension of danger to the blind continuation of the traditional novel. If the reader is only ever faced with the one kind of fictional event, one type of fictional character, how will growth and change occur? ―Now, it is clear that the world in which we live is being transformed with great rapidity. Traditional narrative techniques are incapable of integrating all the new relations thus created. There results a perpetual uneasiness; it is impossible for our consciousness to organize all the information which assails it, because it lacks adequate tools‖ (Butor Inventory 28). It becomes the responsibility of the writer to apprehend changes in the world and to reflect these changes in the form and content of the narrative in order to help the reading public to evolve. For Butor the creation of new novelistic forms is not a luxury but a necessity. He takes those writers who shirk their responsibility to task:

The search for new novelistic forms with a greater power of integration thus plays a triple role in relation to our consciousness of reality: unmasking, exploration, and adaptation. The novelist who refuses to accept this task, never discarding old habits, never

demanding any particular effort of his reader, never obliging him to confront himself, to question attitudes long since taken for granted, will certainly enjoy a readier success, but he becomes the accomplice of that profound uneasiness, that darkness, in which we are groping for our way. He stiffens the reflexes of our consciousness even more, making any awakening more difficult; he contributes to its suffocation, so that even if his intentions are generous, his work is in the last analysis a poison. (Butor Inventory 28)

These are not the plaintive words of Robbe-Grillet nor the preoccupied ideas of

Sarraute. While he admits the writer holding onto past forms will have an easier time of it, Butor also blames him for the stultification of society. If the reader does not have the correct tools to deal with the changing world, he or she will not prosper and society itself will not advance.

Michel Butor has given a lot of thought to the area of narrative time and space and how they are connected. In his essay ―Research on the Technique of the Novel‖ he takes us through a sort of primer on the subject. In early times when storytelling was an oral event, the chronology of the narrative approximated that of the experiences of the heroes in roughly the same order.

Butor states ―the time of the narrative is then like a contraction of the time of the adventure‖ (Butor Inventory 17). In the novel, however, with its multiple characters, narrative threads, and themes, it is impossible to continue in this simple manner. When the action of a story shifts from one character to another we may very well end up in a different time and place altogether. ―Each new character, on closer inspection, suggests material about his past, a backward glance, and soon what will become essential for our understanding of the

36 narrative is not only the past history of one character or another, but what the others know or do not know about him at a given moment…‖ (Butor Inventory

17). Thus the novel calls for what Butor calls ―the structure of succession‖ which includes temporal counterpoint and temporal discontinuity. These allow for the kind of narrative gymnastics that one sees in a tale with multiple threads. As an example of temporal counterpoint, Butor cites Kierkegaard‘s ―Narrative of

Passion,‖ part of his Stages of Life’s Way, where the narrator ―keeps a diary of the preceding year in which he intersperses notes on the present...‖ (Butor Inventory

19). (Are we surprised that this technique is exactly what we will find in Butor‘s own novel Passing Time?) In a work such as Kierkegaard‘s we would find the past of the narrative and the present of the narrative existing in the same space and perhaps even playing off one another.

Temporal discontinuity arises when there are multiple layers of narrative because a break occurs every time there is a switch from one to another layer.

Butor explains:

All narration presents itself in a rhythm of fullness and emptiness, for not only is it impossible to recount all events in linear succession, but within any given sequence to give the entire series of facts. We experience time as continuity only at certain moments. Occasionally the narrative will proceed by a flowing movement, but between these torrential segments we shall make, without realizing it, enormous jumps. (Butor Inventory 19)

To shift from the current action to a memory of the past, or to a supposition of the future is a discontinuity. To jump from the point of view of one character to the point of view of another is also discontinuous. There is no way a reader

37 would stand for the simple statement of fact upon fact or the relating of one situation after another in chronological order. This sort of narrative would read like a shopping list, and would be about as interesting.

Butor finds a certain charm in the techniques that writers employ to negotiate the jumps necessary to move a narrative along. He writes:

When I employ an expression such as ‗the next day‘ at the beginning of a sentence, I am actually referring to an essential rhythm of our existence, to that recurrence which comes about each day after the interruption of sleep, to that entire form already so habitual which constitutes, for each of us, a day. Time is then apprehended in its essential notation. Not only will each event be the origin of an ever closer inquiry into what has preceded it and what has followed it and indeed what can follow it, but it will arouse echoes, shed light in all those regions of time which in advance correspond to it: the evening before or the next day, the week before or the one after, everything that can give an exact meaning to the expression: the last time or the next time. (Inventory 20)

In all this talk about the basic structure of narrative there is a correlation between the desire for an outdated realism, the knowledge of the complete failure of that realism to serve the reading public, and the beginning of the search for what will serve in realism‘s stead.

The Latent Theorist

Samuel Beckett was not much of a literary critic. Let us not forget the ultimate insult slung by Estragon in Waiting for Godot: ―Crritic!‖ and Vladimir‘s

38 shocked ―Oh!‖ with the stage direction ―He wilts, vanquished, and turns away‖

(Beckett Waiting 48). Beckett has gone so far as to say ―I don‘t have thoughts about my work‖ (Beckett Disjecta 113). Unlike most of our other writers,

Beckett‘s literary forays can be counted on two hands. The two major ones are both early offerings, concerned with certain predecessors of our Nouveau

Roman, Joyce and Proust. The first of these is ―Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce‖ written for a laudatory volume entitled Our Exagimination Round His Factification

For Incamination of Work In Progress, published in anticipation of Joyce‘s Finnegans

Wake in 1929. The second critical piece is a (short) book length study, Proust, published in 1931. There is also a small ―miscellany of criticism‖ edited by Ruby

Cohn; its title, which was reportedly chosen by Beckett himself, is Disjecta and it came out in 1984.

Beckett‘s view of criticism can be inferred from quotes in these varied works. Cohn reports that Disjecta is comprised of material Beckett ―belittles as mere products of friendly obligation or economic need.‖ A little further down the page she characterizes both Beckett and his criticism when she writes:

―Although Beckett does not swerve from commitment to an art of questions, hesitations, explorations––its theory and practice––his expression erupts in provocative articles, disdainful reviews, reflective essays, searching letters, and rare lyrical homage‖ (Beckett Disjecta 7). And in his article

―Dante…Bruno..Vico.Joyce‖ we find this quote: ―Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the

39 dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers?

Literary criticism is not book-keeping‖ (Beckett ―Dante‖ 107)6. Clearly, Beckett‘s critical offerings are nothing like the volumes and articles published by our other writers, yet they somehow speak in a voice that is compatible with the ideas offered by the Nouveaux Romanciers above. After all, each of our writers was reacting to a similar time and space in the evolution of literature, which is why we are undertaking this study today.

Let‘s take a look at some quotes from Beckett‘s critical works and see how they might fit in with what we have found from the others. For a start, we can see a great preoccupation with form and content in this quote from

―Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce‖:

On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression––pages and pages of it. And if you don‘t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. The rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious / 116/ intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension.‖ 116-117

Although this may need a little more deciphering than the writings we have seen thus far, I think there are many similarities to be found. When we turn our focus to the creative works of these writers, to the proverbial theory in practice, we will find almost nothing but ―direct expression.‖ Form and content are definitely kindred spirits in the Nouveau Roman. We find ourselves hard pressed to ever

40 thumb through some of these novels and separate the content from the form in such a way as to find, say, a particular moment in the story. There can be no

―rapid skimming and absorption‖ for the ―cream of sense‖ is anything but scant.

Indeed, one becomes so disengaged in the course of these novels, it is often impossible to get any meaning without a significant effort. The same, of course, is equally true of Beckett‘s novels.

In a similar vein, the Nouveaux Romanciers are preoccupied with the ideas of object and subject. We will find in Robbe-Grillet a significant obsession with the object, and its place in literature. In Sarraute we will see the importance of subjectivity, and how it can lead us to a deeper understanding of her characters. In Beckett‘s writings on Proust, we find this quote:

So far we have considered a mobile subject before an ideal object, immutable and incorruptible. But our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena. Exemption from intrinsic flux in a given object does not change the fact that it is the correlative of a subject that does not enjoy such immunity. The observer infects the observed with his own mobility. Moreover, when it is a case of human intercourse, we are faced by the problem of an object whose mobility is not merely a function of the subject‘s, but independent and personal: two separate and immanent dynamisms related by no system of synchronisation. So that whatever the object, our thirst for possession is, by definition insatiable. At the best, all that is realised in Time (all Time produce), whether in Art or Life, can only be possessed successively, by a series of partial annexations––and never integrally and at once. 6-7

It appears that Beckett is exploring the idea that the object can never be objectively apprehended, because it must be seen through the consciousness of a subject. This is in direct opposition to Robbe-Grillet‘s objects for object‘s sake.

He is definitely more enamored with the objective correlative, while Beckett speaks clearly of the ―correlative of a subject.‖ Conversely it is precisely this idea of the subject-on-subject mobility that finds Beckett in some accordance with

Sarraute. I believe we can easily extrapolate the sentence ―The observer infects the observed with his own mobility‖ to include tropisms. Does not one consciousness often need another to stimulate the ―emotional stirrings‖ that comprise a tropism? Perhaps these stirrings are exactly what Beckett is alluding to in the phrase ―two separate and immanent dynamisms related by no system of synchronisation.‖ Dynamisms are movements just as the tropisms imply, and we never know when or how they come to be. The stirring and its impetus are somehow related, but not overtly.

In another quote from Proust, Beckett continues this thread of inquiry. He writes:

The identification of immediate with past experience, the recurrence of past action or reaction in the present, amounts to a participation between the ideal and the real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance. Such participation frees the essential reality that is denied to the contemplative as to the active life. What is common to present and past is more essential than either taken separately. Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic. Imagination, applied –– a priori––to what is absent, is exercised in vacuo and cannot tolerate the limits of the real. Nor is any direct and purely experimental contact possible between subject and object, because they are automatically separated by the subject‘s consciousness of perception, and the object loses it purity and becomes a mere intellectual pretext or motive. But, thanks to this reduplication, the experience is at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal.‖ (Beckett Proust 55-56)

Here again we see reiterated that the object is dependent on the subject. There can be no meaning in an object without it being comprehended by a consciousness. Yet this quote also opens the subject/ object dialogue to include many aspects of literature that we have been dealing with so far in this chapter.

One is the place of past in the present moment of literature, while another is what I would characterize as the reaction against Balzac. The novelist‘s ability to create a reality that is not idealized, one that does not privilege empirical fact over imaginative creation is one issue all three of our Nouveaux Romanciers have in common. But, in exploring Proust‘s idea of past memory recreated in present moment through outside stimulus (e.g. the famous madeleine) Beckett adds a temporal quality to the mix. For, in combining the past and the present, in the recreation of the object in the consciousness, there comes an added superior meaning.

Although the Nouveaux Romanciers were more into theory than Beckett and although Beckett started his theoretical career slightly ahead of them, I think we can see that they were concerned with similar themes. Beckett was writing on writers considered to be predecessors of the Nouveau Roman, yet he was not placing himself as contemporary to Proust or even to Joyce, whom he knew personally. Beckett‘s theory was also not part of his own creative process, at least according to him. The same cannot be said with much assurance in the case of Robbe-Grillet or Sarraute. And like Butor, Beckett wrote on art as well as literature, but it is significant to note that he knew the artists he wrote on and

43 may have done so out of a sense of friendship rather than criticism. One final difference between Beckett and the others is the fact that it does not offer a reader any advantage to try to understand Beckett from a theoretical standpoint; in the end his fiction will still be as difficult to comprehend, whether you have read his criticism or not.

1 Germaine Brée states that ―Beckett‘s work has an affinity with that of the most metaphysical of French critics, Maurice Blanchot‖ in her essay ―Beckett‘s ‗grands articulés‖ in Samuel Beckett Now (Melvin J. Friedman, editor).

2 Vivian Mercier states ―In French she [Sarraute] calls these modifications mouvements, a word that Maria Jolas habitually translates as ‗movements.‘ This does not seem to me a very happy rendering, as mouvement in this sort of context can very often be translated into English simply by the word ‗em otion‘ or––more subtly––by the phrase ‗emotional stirring‘ or ‗stirring of emotion.‘ (Mercier 104-105)

3 I will be referring to the preface to the 1963 translation of Sarraute‘s premier work which was originally published in 1939. Our translation is based on the 1957 reprint which included six more tropisms than the original version.

4 We should note that Sarraute would eschew such Freudian terminology, as she avoided all overtly psychological terms in her fictions. She did, however cite Freud once

in her critical work The Age of Suspicion. In discussing how much more learned the reader had become, Sarraute states: ―He has made the acquaintance of Joyce, Proust, and

Freud; the trickle, imperceptible from without, of the interior monologue; the infin itely profuse growth of the psychological world and the vast, as yet almost unexplored regions of the unconscious‖ (62). Clearly, the moderns in literature as well as in the science of the mind were influential for Sarraute, even if she felt psychology wa s passe in her writing.

5 Most of the essays I will be quoting here have been translated and collected into the volume Inventory, edited by Richard Howard, and published in 1968.

6 The sentiment found in this quote is reminiscent of the debate we explored earlier surrounding the term Nouveau Roman.

PART TWO: INVESTIGATION

There are many different ways we could begin to investigate the similarities and differences in the works of our four writers. I have decided to take a hint from my writers themselves and fashion my study on what they perceived as their own newness. In his essay ―New Novel, New Man‖ Robbe-

Grillet writes:

There was, there still is, particularly in France, a theory of the novel implicitly recognized by everyone or nearly everyone, a theory that is thrown up like a wall against all the books we have published. We are told: ―You do not create characters, hence you are not writing true novels,‖ ―you are not telling stories, hence you are not writing true novels,‖ ―you are not studying psychology or milieu, you are not analyzing passions, hence you are not writing true novels,‖ etc. (For a New Novel 135)

In this quote we can get an idea of what the new novels had that was different from the true novels. Looking at some of the basic aspects of form and content, i.e. characterization (including point of view) and narrative (including plot, style, and structure), will be the quickest and most sure way to decipher the puzzle of newness.

Vivian Mercier writes about Beckett‘s influence on the Nouveau Roman.

She posits that his ―contribution…to the theory and practice of the New Novel is essentially fourfold‖ (19):

First, Beckett‘s work––especially The Unnamable––reveals once and for all the minima of the novel: no plot, an almost nonexistent protagonist, no setting. Second, we have the apparently entirely original idea of the character who invents a life for himself… Third, there is the awareness…that words are the life of the fictional character… Finally, Beckett reminds us again and again that fiction is fiction. (Mercier 20)

This quote may put Beckett in a lead position for our Nouveaux Romanciers, but it also gives us a basis from which to proceed. In studying the aspects of narrative I have conceptualized above we will be able to see where the above four points coincide with the works of the Nouveau Roman.

CHAPTER TWO: CHARACTER

The View from Robbe-Grillet

In the works of Robbe-Grillet we have quite a bit of experiment with characterization and point of view. Robbe-Grillet offers us a completely objective reality, yet one that is colored totally by his characters' perceptions.

This technique gives a of cinematic quality to his novels. The text is made up only of what the character sees in sight without any obvious tinge of emotion.

The most impressive example of this form of writing occurs in Jealousy.

In Robbe-Grillet‘s novel Jealousy1 characterization is a very strange animal.

For all intents and purposes, this novel appears to be a third person narrative, when in fact it is told by a limited omniscient narrator. This is a case of taking the term anonymous narration to its fullest extreme, as Robbe-Grillet has hidden the cuckolded husband of A… yet has given him the point of view of this novel.

The situation of the narrator becomes even more interesting when we realize he is another character, who is involved in the story. Vivian Mercier points out that in Jealousy (and in The Voyeur, which we will discuss next) the

―characters, like all of us, see not only what is objectively present to the open eye but what memory, dream, imagination, or even hallucination present to the

‗mind‘s eye.‘‖(167) This is especially problematic with the husband, as the

48 reader is not given any indication that what is being reported has been processed by a human mind. How can we know what the narrator dreams, when we aren‘t even sure what his thoughts are? Mercier goes on to say that the reader‘s plight becomes even more pronounced because:

we are allowed to penetrate the mind of the jealous husband, but we can never be entirely sure just which scenes are observed by his outer eye and which by the inner eye, since both types of vision are treated as identical. Furthermore, everything that either ‗eye‘ sees is described in the present tense, so that we cannot distinguish what is happening ‗now‘ from what is being remembered from the past or anticipated in the future (Mercier 167).

This artificial construction of a story being told by a non-character whose only apparent input is to replay the scene of a smashed centipede again and again, and few indications of when any other events on the verandah actually take place makes life hard for the reader. The most absent character soon becomes the most sought after. Who is this man? How do we feel about him? It seems that we are hard pressed to feel for him, when our only indication of his emotion is a stain on the wall.

Being so inside the head of one character has an interesting effect on the way we see the other characters in Jealousy. As we have seen, the mind we are in goes unmentioned, unremarked upon, unexplained, which tends to make the characters we are shone appear flat. The actions of A… and Franck play like a movie on a screen because our narrator doesn‘t have the gift of omniscience.

Take this passage, for example:

Dawn has not yet broken.

Franck will come soon to call for A… and take her down to the port. She is sitting in front of the oval mirror where her full face is reflected, lit from only one side, at a short distance from her own face seen in profile. A… bends toward the mirror. The two faces come closer. They are no more than four inches from each other, but they keep their forms and their respective positions: a profile and a full face, parallel to each other. The right hand and the hand in the mirror trace on the lips and on their reflection the exact image of the lips, somewhat brighter, clearer, slightly darker. Two light knocks sound at the hallway door. The bright lips and the lips in profile move in perfect synchronization: ―Yes, what is it‖ The voice is restrained, as in a sickroom, or like the voice of a thief talking to his accomplice. ―The gentleman, he is here,‖ the boy‘s voice answers on the other side of the door. No sound of a motor, however, has broken the silence (which has no silence, but the continuous hissing of the kerosene lamp). A… says ―I‘m coming.‖ She calmly finishes the curving rim above her chin with an assured gesture. She stands up, crosses the room, walks around the big bed, picks up her handbag on the chest and the whited wide-brimmed straw hat. She opens the door without making any noise (though without excessive precautions), goes out, closes the door behind her. The sound of her steps fades down the hallway. The entrance door opens and closes. It is six-thirty. (Robbe-Grillet Two Novels 102-103)

Here the narration seems flat because we do not gain anything from the mind we are hosted in, nor are we allowed into A…‘s mind. The statement of facts, such as the time of day or when Franck is coming are abstracted, gotten out of the way. The most important thing is the description of A…, how she is sitting, what she is doing. For this reason, the description of her face in the mirror gives us no

50 clues, either to her state of mind, or to her husband‘s. We are only as engaged in this scene as the lens of a camera would allow us to be. Thus, at the end of the passage, we do not follow A…‘s progress down the hallway, but only hear her leaving. The entire scene lacks emotion and the only modifiers used to characterize her are the words ―restrained‖ (her voice) and ―calmly.‖

So, in effect we have a story created by a hidden character, who lives a life devoid of emotion. We are also denied the emotion that any of the other characters experience, because of this subjective narration. No mad acts of passion here, no excited plotting of an adulterous tryst, and definitely no hint of jealousy. And the only indication of trauma must be inferred from a centipede smear upon a wall. Indeed, the centipede is the key to many things as Stoltzfus explains:

Such objective correlatives––that is, the visible image of an inner state of mind––(like the centipede) are the hard core of the outside world that which surrounds a protagonist, but the fact that the centipede comes to stand for the husband‘s jealousy reveals how the novelist can project the inner state of mind of a character into what appears to be simply a description of landscape. This device enables the novelist to describe, simultaneously, the ―unseen‖ subconscious mind of a character, his physical environment, and the extent to which he is anthropomorphizing his environment. (Alain Robbe-Grillet 36)

Thus, the actual trauma of the situation is deflected by the narrator‘s focus on the centipede. Is this the new form of denial, what the modern man does to cope with unnerving situations in his life? What will the man who kills do to expiate his sins? Let‘s see.

In The Voyeur we find a similar viewer-istic situation with a more traditional main character. Mathias, our protagonist, is not hidden, and is even given a name. His story is written as a third person narrative, yet it is completely subjective in nature.

Everything is offered through Mathias‘ perceptions. The reader is never anywhere other than where Mathias is, never hears or smells anything that he doesn‘t.2 In a sense, Mathias is creating the story as surely as Sarraute‘s characters are. Robbe-Grillet‘s novel is written in such a way that the reader is distanced from any true emotion. The reader is completely under Mathias' control and subject to all his flashbacks and repetitious thoughts, yet without any of his feelings of psychic trauma. In this way, Robbe-Grillet can explore such emotionally charged subjects as rape, murder, and adultery without any of the sensational excitement we find in novels today. In fact, so much is left to the reader to figure out that there is never any true denouement and the reader must piece together the crimes of Mathias, and even decide whether he has committed one or two murders or none at all. For Mathias‘ thoughts become more and more disjointed as the narrative progresses. Scenes are repeated, in part or in whole, again and again, such as the scene of the drawing of a seagull when he was a boy. Scenes also become mixed up, jumbled together to form seemingly new situations. Are these flashbacks, or are they simply fantasies in the mind of a serial killer?

Whether they are flashbacks or fantasies, it soon becomes clear that these episodes are most importantly fabrications of our protagonist. For example, at one point, Mathias is told by the proprietor of a café that he can go upstairs to show his watches to the man‘s wife. What he finds upstairs is an empty bedroom with a black and white tile floor. Inside there is a rumpled bed with a red bedspread, an oval mirror, a night table with a lamp and a p ack of cigarettes on top, and an oil painting on the wall:

Over the bed, an oil painting (or a vulgar reproduction framed as if it were a masterpiece) showed the corner of a room just like the one in which it hung: a low bed, a night table, a lambskin. Kneeling on the lambskin and facing the bed, a little girl in a nightgown is about to say her prayers, bending her head over her clasped hands. It is evening. The lamp illuminates from a forty-five-degree angle, the child‘s neck and right shoulder (54).

Later, as he is sitting on the rocks by the water, he imagines himself back in the room, this time with a young girl sitting on the bed. In the next sentence he pulls a newspaper clipping out of his wallet that tells about the investigation into the murder of a young girl. After reading it, he gets up and walks to the road where he closes his eyes and imagines himself as the observer of a scene in the bedroom. He sees in the mirror, a man watching the girl on the bed. He sees the girl get up and join the man which moves her into the mirror as well. What follows is a disturbing scene where the man forces the girl down onto the floor and apparently orders her hands behind her back ―her wrists crossed as if bound‖ (Robbe-Grillet Voyeur 63).

Then the voice can be heard saying ―You are beautiful…‖ with a kind of restrained violence; and again the giant‘s fingers fall upon

his prey who now lies at his feet––so small as to seem almost deformed. His fingertips trail over the naked skin of her neck, along the nape that is completely exposed by the arrangement of the hair; then his hand slides under her ear to stroke her mouth and face in the same way, finally forcing her to lift her head and expose the large dark eyes between their long doll‘s lashes. (Voyeur 63)

This fantasy is even more disturbing than the actual murder that takes place in the story, because we are never allowed to see that scene. Thus, Mathias‘ displacements are necessarily much more elaborate than those of the jealous husband, who has not committed any indiscretions of his own, but rather reacts to those he perceives to be his wife‘s. But, because of the form of the novel, it is even difficult to determine whether Mathias has killed before or not. His flashbacks are titillating, if the reader can figure out what they mean. And just as the husband‘s emotional state is transferred to the smear on the wall, as Stoltzfus explains, Mathias‘ passion is illustrated by the crashing of waves: ―Descriptions of the waves for instance act as objective correlatives for Mathias‘ mounting sexual desire and thus become the objectification of his subconscious‖ (Alain

Robbe-Grillet 28). Again, objects for Robbe-Grillet are easier to deal with than passions of the human heart. In the end, we can only guess what Mathias‘ crime might have looked like, which is perhaps for the best.

The Interior designs of Sarraute

As we have seen earlier, Nathalie Sarraute is very much interested in what is going on beneath the surface of her characters. For Sarraute the direct description of characters, how they look, what they think and feel, is somehow dishonest. To try to depict the world in fiction in a realistic manner is misleading. If there must be a break with the past, an improvement to save the novel, then what better place to start than with character. According to Babcock in Sarraute‘s eyes, ―The fuller the characterization––the more ‗unforgettable‘ the character––the more likely the reader is to see in the character one of the literary types made familiar by the long list of ‗real novelists‘ the reader has absorbed‖

(31). In speaking of the works of writers who had gone before her, Balzac and

―the ancients,‖ Sarraute declares, ―In those novels the characters are the principle anchors and the plot plays the most important part and monopolizes the reader‘s entire attention. It was no longer there, as far as I was concerned, that the source of life was to be found‖ (―Nathalie Sarraute‖ 126). Thus, the well heeled character, labeled and described within an inch of its life, would only cloud the reader‘s ability to see what Ms. Sarraute is offering.

Armed with the above knowledge, no reader should be surprised to find that Sarraute‘s first two novels––Portrait of an Unknown Man (1948) and Martereau

(1953)––are populated by numerous unnamed individuals. In struggling to follow the trail of pronouns, to identify each separate character, and recognize the reoccurrence of that character later, the reader is distanced from both the characters themselves and the world in which they exist. This effect is in direct

55 service to Sarraute‘s plan, for the tropisms she longs to explore ―develop in anonymous consciousnesses.‖ She goes on to say ―I have never been able to give a name to those appearances which for me are characters only when they speak of each other and see themselves as characters‖ (―Nathalie Sarraute‖ 127). For

Sarraute, the reader must be able to access that liminal space which represents the mind of a character. This is vital to her exploration of tropisms.

The reader is asked to piece together the characters from clues given in the text. For example, in Portrait we must describe the main character for ourselves.

He is well read, discussing at some length characters in literature, War and Peace, for example3. We can guess that he is also cultured because he frequents museums. His words are very poetic at times. For example this passage: ―My fetishes. My little gods. The altars on which I had once laid so many secret offerings, back in the days when I still had all my strength, all my purity‖

(Sarraute Portrait 87-88). We can also conjecture that he is mentally fragile on the evidence that he is seeing a ―specialist,‖ read ―shrink‖ of some sort. Yet even after all this supposition, we don‘t know the color of his hair, or how tall he is, none of the traditional indications of a character in literature.

To illustrate just how difficult it can be to get a clear picture of one of

Sarraute‘s characters, I must admit that I completely misread this character. I assumed he was a young man, one still in the throes of self definition. His obsessions seemed immature, his insecurities too great for an older person. The fact that his parents take him to see a psychologist because they are worried

56 about him, strikes me as how one would treat an adolescent or at least a younger man. My misreading was exacerbated by the fact that I missed what few clues there were to this man‘s actual appearance. Gretchen Besser enlightened me in this passage from her book, Nathalie Sarraute: ―Near the end of Portrait, the narrator catches sight of his reflection in a shop window; this is the only intimation of his outward appearance: a pot-bellied, balding little man with a bedraggled air‖ (40). Indeed, it is the very nature of Sarraute‘s writing, the unhinged quality she seeks to help release her reader from the mundane exterior world, that makes it nearly impossible for me to thumb back through the book and find the passage that Besser describes above. This I offer as a nod to Ms.

Sarraute‘s successful execution of her technique.

Sarraute uses a first person point of view to make sure the reality presented in her novels is a subjective one. With this technique, she immerses the reader in the mind of one character, allowing the reader no other reality except that which exists through that subjective perception. For this reason, the reader is often at the mercy of this character. Both Portrait and Martereau are first person narratives told by characters experiencing overwhelming obsessions.

These somewhat troubled characters lead the reader in a merry chase. In Portrait our leading man––who is never named––has as his focus an acquaintance and his daughter. We only see these people through the eyes of this somewhat dubious character. His tendency is not only to report objectively the world around him, but also to fabricate stories about those who populate that world.

This sometimes gives the novel the appearance of an anonymous or observer narration. Let‘s take, for example, a scene at the train station. This scene starts a page earlier, with our unnamed narrator observing two people at the train station. It continues:

He loved that, I know, the homely black oilcloth bundle and the worn old coat, and the dirty platform filled with sulphur fumes, the houses, the little gardens: it was in order to get a whiff of that, to inhale it all with that dubious, sweetish sensuality that we feel when we sniff our own odors, that he had come here. Somewhat as I myself had done. He had felt all exhilarated before taking the train, at the moment when his ticket was handed to him and he read the name of the station on the little third -class gray card. In the compartment, he had remained huddled up to himself, relishing it all in advance, filled with a funny sort of satisfaction that he would not have been able to analyze, and he had felt quite cheerful when, on the way out, as he gave up his ticket, he saw, in front of the station, the cracked nameplate he knew so well… From time to time he needs to come and rub up against all that, he needs to come and sniff it, there‘s certainly something about it that excites him and gives him a sensation similar to that of the wealthy bourgeois walking through the Flea Market… Certainly, in the same way that I had come bearing my treasures with me, he had come with, in the back of his mind, the gleaming well-polished lawn of the dairy farm… (Sarraute Portrait 103-105)

Although truncated, this passage shows that the ―I‖ completely disappears at times, and the narrative takes on the look of the third person omniscient point of view. The main character is the one ostensibly writing the story. He tells us what the other man is feeling, thinking, what his ―needs‖ are, as if it were fact and not fabrication. For when the ―I‖ disappears the novel reads quite differently, not as the extended monologue it is, but as a tale told from the outside, by a narrator that is omnipresent, but not actually present. In the

58 passage quoted above, the ―I‖ pops up just in time to remind the reader who is actually telling the gentleman‘s tale. The narrator even phrases his suppositions in a way that clearly shows their origin, slipping in the occasional ―I know‖ or

―Somewhat as I myself had done‖ or ―in the same way that I had come.‖

In less grand style, Sarraute‘s narrator also simply describes other characters. These descriptions are in no way mundane, as we would expect. For example, In Portrait we find this passage:

If it had involved her alone, I shouldn‘t have given it a thought. I know that she needs so little, the merest nothing makes her tremble, this Hypersensitive lined with quivering little silken tentacles that sway at the slightest breath, so that she is constantly brushed by fleeting shadows like those the gentlest of breezes can set in motion on a prairie or a wheat field. Like dogs sniffing along a wall at suspicious odors they alone recognize, with her nose to the ground, she picks up the scent of the things people are ashamed of; she sniffs at implied meanings, follows through the traces of hidden humiliations, unable to break away from them. (135)

What can the reader glean from the description above? Do we know anything about the girl in question? She has tentacles and sniffs like a dog? Throughout the novel she is never named, nor is she ever described in realistic terms, beyond the hyperbole of the narrator. In truth, nothing is ever offered outside the narrator‘s dramatic tone. For this reason, I believe we often find out more about our narrator than about the characters he describes. The above description of the girl gives the reader hints about his slightly maniacal thought patterns and his fear-filled and suspicious nature. And, as in many of the Nouveaux Romans, the reader must question the speaker‘s veracity at all turns.

There are a few characters in Sarraute‘s works who bear traditional nomenclatures, such as Martereau and Louis Dumontet, the fiancé of the girl in

Portrait. In Sarraute‘s works the naming of a character becomes just as significant as not naming him or her. Vivian Mercier conjectures the names show up because ―Here is a man who has never left the common-sense world, who is thoroughly at home in it. His name is like the label on a château -bottled wine––a guarantee of the contents. No possibility of ambiguity––or growth––here‖ (126).

This can be translated as, no need to go inside because there are no tropisms to be found here. These are stock characters designed only to act the foil for the subjective narrator. Any tropisms that arise will be found in the narrator, not the named character.

Thus, as with all the characters in Sarraute‘s first two novels, Martereau is never seen objectively. Indeed, he is rarely shown in realistic terms. For example, the first description we get of him reads:

I‘ve always been searching for Martereau. His image––now I realize it––has always haunted me, under various aspects. I gazed at it with nostalgia. He was the distant mother-country from which, for mysterious reasons, I had been banished; the home port, the peaceful haven, to which I had lost the way; the land on which I could never go ashore, tossed as I was on a rough sea, drifting constantly with the changing currents. (Sarraute Martereau 71)

Once again, we must wonder what the character described looks like. Instead of realistic features, Martereau is a ―mother-country,‖ a ―home port,‖ a ―peaceful haven.‖ He is clearly something safe, for our narrator who for some reason must be banished or exiled. Later, we have this description of the man: ―Meanwhile,

Martereau was there, right nearby; one had only to stretch out one‘s hand.

Martereau in the flesh, a hundred times better than the finest playthings and the most sumptuous caskets. Martereau, whom I had known for a long time‖ (74-

75). Again, the man is like a toy or an expensive knick-knack. He is familiar like something old, and therefore comforting. And like the narrator of Portrait, we have another picture skewed to fit the observer‘s mindset.

Ms. Sarraute has written that for the narrator, Martereau is the only person in his world who is not driven by tropisms. This is the thing to be desired, the shelter and the richness to be coveted. But, nothing so good is meant to last. Sarraute writes: ―But Martereau, for a futile reason, arouses suspicion.

Through this tiny hole which has been made in the solid shell that protects all characters in life and in novels, through this narrow chink, the narrator sees that

Martereau is activated by the sam e movements. He is as people are, not in traditional novels, but in real life‖ (Sarraute ―New Movements‖ 429). The evolution of this narrator, his ability to finally see the reality before him, instead of his own idealized fantasy of those around him is surprising. It both furthers

Sarraute‘s technique and perhaps anticipates the changes that will come in her next novel. Yet the decline of Martereau is not the most significant point in the above quotation. Is Sarraute in fact saying that narrator sees the character of

Martereau as people are in real life?

In her later novel, The Planetarium, Sarraute has expanded on her previous techniques. Her cast of characters grows immensely and she does something

61 completely different with point of view. This time what appears as a third person narrative actually turns out to be a polyphonic interior monologue with brief occurrences of what Sarraute calls conversation and subconversation. From the very first paragraph of the book, the reader gets a sense that th is is not a typical narrator:

No, really, try as you might, you could find nothing to say against it, it‘s perfect…a real surprise, a piece of luck…an exquisite combination, that velvet curtain, made of very heavy velvet, the best quality wool velvet, in a deep green, quiet and unobtrusive…And at the same time, a warm luminous shade…Marvelous against the gold glints of the beige wall…And the wall itself…How effective…You‘d think it was skin…It‘s as soft as chamois…One should always insist on that extremely fine stenciling, the tiny dots give a texture like down…But how dangerous, how mad, really, to choose from samples, to think that she had been within a hair‘s breadth––and how delightful it is to think back on it now––of taking the almond green. Or worse than that, the other, the one that tended towards emerald… Wouldn‘t that be something, a blue green against this beige wall…It‘s funny how this one, looked at in a small piece, had seemed lifeless, faded…What misgivings, what hesitations…And now, quite obviously, it was just what was wanted… 7-8

The paragraph continues on for another three pages. It goes on and on in this conversational style, with its rather gossipy tone. It is not presented as an impersonal third person point of view but rather it is narrated by some strange persona which at first does not appear to be physically characterized in the novel, above its mocking commentary. This is a very intimate narrator, one who makes judgements about the characters it is describing, one who has opinions about quality of the wool velvet used in a curtain, or the shade of green chosen to offset the beige wall in an old woman‘s apartment.

At some point the reader discovers that the narrative viewpoint shifts from person to person, and it is left up to the reader to decipher who is speaking at a given time. Unlike the previous novels, we find that there are even names associated with characters in The Planetarium. Commenting on this fact Sarraute writes: ―No character bears any name when I speak about him and no narrator helps the reader by explaining what is going on. There are no names…for the characters, except when they speak about each other, and then, naturally, they call each other by their names‖ (―New Movements‖ 429). The growth of the cast from three or four to many, seems to have necessitated this change in Sarraute‘s technique.

There is in the midst of this multiple narrative, one dominant voice. Alain

Guimiez could very well be considered the main character, kin to those two that came before him, but he is not ultimately given the entire power of creation that they were. He does exhibit some of the same insecurities and vacillations that the first person narrators do, but without the responsibility of composing the narrative. For example, early on in the narrative, when we first meet him, Alain is being encouraged by what appears to be the hostess at a party to recount in a humorous way the story of his aunt and the decorating which is the subject of the first passage of the book quoted above. This passage goes on for pages, shifting from one character‘s view to another: ―Oh, he must tell you that one…‖ the hostess begins, but the next paragraph is apparently Alain‘s thoughts: ―That abrupt way she has of taking you by the scruff of the neck and throwing you

63 right in the middle of the ring, for people to gape at…the lack of tact she has, of sensitivity… But it‘s his fault as well, he knows it. With him it is always that desire of his to have people approve of him, make a fuss over him…‖ (Sarraute

Planetarium 22) This commentary resembles that of the subjective narrators, yet it is clearly not the same thing. We get a more critical look at Alain than we do at the main characters of the other novels. We know he is at fault, that he has a desire to make people like him. In a way this technique imparts to Alain a part in the culpability (whatever it may be for) that the previous narrators never could acknowledge. He is also not allowed to offer the mixture of fantasy and

―real‖ observation that the others are obliged to fashion their novels with.

Valeri Minogue gives us a view of the role of the novelist in the novel in her article ―Nathalie Sarraute‘s Le Planétarium: the Narrator Narrated :

Novelist and characters meet on the common ground of the creative effort. The narrative appears indeed, to be the result of an arrangement by which the novelist provides the words for the constant efforts of the characters to come into existence and be recognised. At the same time, however, the novelist reserves the privilege of undermining their efforts even in the act of articulating them. We see simultaneously the characters‘ attempts at self- definition and the novelist‘s refusal to underwrite their presumptions. They all partake equally of ambiguity: none is accorded the recognition he craves. For the distinction of Le Planétarium is to offer a polyphonic narrative, constantly passing— without warning—from one character to another, from one version of the world to another. (219)

Sarraute is treating her narrators equally, while changing their role in the novel.

The evolution of the newness of her novels is rooted, like everything else, in the exploration of the tropisms and how they are generated and apprehended. The

64 grand scale of Le Planétarium in relation to the sparseness of both Portrait and

Martereau gave Sarraute the opportunity to excel in portraying how these movements take place between people. To do this, she clearly needed to move into an arena bigger than the inside of one character‘s mind.

The Character Stylings of Butor

Characterization and point of view in the novels of Butor are again a different animal. His second novel Passing Time, while a first person narrative, is not as simple as all that. The journal style of the novel has the main character,

Jacques Revel, reporting on the events of his year in the town of Bleston from the time of his first arrival, while letting the reader know full well that he is nearly at the end of that year. This gives the narrator both the power to create his own life and a great measure of control over the reader. The reader only ever knows how much Revel knows, or how much Revel decides to reveal. The narrator‘s struggles with the language and the geography, his growing paranoia and suspicions about the book The Bleston Murder and his dealings with the book‘s author, George Burton, are all related to the reader from his own perspective.

Moreover, the purpose behind the narrative makes it more dubious at best. In his book The Narratives of Michel Butor, McWilliams points out that the narrator‘s motivation for writing this document is to combat the effect that the city of

Bleston has had on him. ―Drugged by this environment, Revel discovers after seven months that he has slipped into a mindless stupor; he can neither remember his past nor explain his present actions‖ (McWilliams 22). This refuge in writing coming from a state of amnesia does not inspire confidence in the reader.

Once again we find the one situation we are becoming most familiar with in the Nouveau Roman: the reader must wonder how much to trust this particular narrator. For example, the accident on Brown Street, when George

Burton gets hit by a car just after Revel has let slip that Burton is indeed J.C.

Hamilton, author of The Bleston Murder, becomes a cause and effect situation in

Revel‘s mind. Should the reader assume he is right in believing he caused an attempt on another man‘s life by divulging sensitive information? Or should the reader more rightly wonder about the narrator‘s sanity? Is this just another

Nouveau Roman hero who is cracking up rather than saving the day?

This technique allows Butor to keep time ever- present in his narrative, making it an integral part of the action. On Wednesday, September Third,

Jacques writes:

Now three days‘ effort and perseverance, three days‘ writing stand between me and those terrible moments. I was able to resume my reading, and for the past two hours I have been back in those first days of July, as I deciphered the long succession of lines I wrote then, which subsist as intact evidence of those days…270

Here we find the narrator is writing events down, then later going back and reviewing them, and writing that down. Obviously this revisionist technique

66 takes away any objectivity that might exist in the narration. It is the interpretation that becomes important for our narrator, the ability to make events fit whatever image he has in his head, to decipher things that might be hidden in his own memories.

Clearly, this technique serves to keep the reader at a distance from the narration. Sometimes it is difficult to know which time the narrator is speaking in, even with Butor‘s convenient header notations, ―June : November,‖ for example, where the first month designates the past and the second represents the present time of writing. And, once again, are we to trust the narrator‘s re-telling of events? Is there not the tendency to turn our memories into better fiction when we write it all down?

Butor‘s novel A Change of Heart is no less interesting in terms of point of view. This time we find a narrative told in the 2nd person from the point of view of a man on a train, Leon Delmont. For example, early in the novel Butor writes:

If you were afraid of missing this train, whose motion and noise you have grown used to again, it was not that you woke later than you had intended this morning, for on the contrary your first movement on opening your eyes was to stretch out your arm to prevent the alarm from ringing, while dawn began to show in relief the tumbled sheets on your bed, looking as they emerged from darkness like defeated ghosts, lying crushed on the soft warm surface from which you were trying to tear yourself. (Butor Change 8)

What would seem an awkward style, with the reader constantly being told ―You this,‖ and ―You that‖ turns out instead to resemble a very extended example of stream-of-consciousness. This intimate construction strikes me as a sort of cross

67 between Sarraute‘s interior monologue and Robbe-Grillet‘s subjective filter. For in this novel we are following the path of one person, with all his present observations and his thoughts about the future and his memories of the past intricately woven into a continuous stream. Just as Jacques Revel docu mented his past to understand a mystery, so Leon Delmont is reviewing things in his head to understand his life, to ultimately make what turns out to be a momentous decision.

Over the course of this novel, the reader gains the most complete portrait of almost any character in the Nouveau Roman. Delmont leads the reader through memory, present observation, and even future intention. We find out about his not so happy marriage to Henriette, his job which requires that he often take a similar trip to Rome in service of the Scabelli typewriter company

(although in that case he always travels in the first-class compartment), and that it is on one of these trips that he as met his mistress, Cécile, in Rome. We find that he has undertaken his present trip to bring Cécile to live in Paris, where he promised to house her in anticipation of leaving his family to marry her.

Along the way, Delmont makes up stories, quelle surprise, about the other passengers in the compartment. For example, there is this passage about a man whom Delmont nicknames ―the professor‖:

He‘s wearing a wedding ring on his slender, shaking finger; he probably goes to give his lectures two or three times a week, or perhaps once only if he‘s been clever, if he has a pied-à-terre there or a cheapish hotel that suits him, for his salary is not likely to be princely, leaving his wife in Paris, where he lives like most of his colleagues, with the children, if he has children, who have to stay

there for the sake of their education, not that there aren‘t excellent schools in this town but because they may already have passed their baccalauréat, the eldest girl at any rate or the eldest boy (it‘s a foolish reaction, granted, but you certainly wish your first child had been a boy, since although he‘s undoubtedly younger than you, he may have married earlier, and his children have probably been more carefully educated and will surely have done better at school than Madeleine, who hasn‘t yet received her diploma at the age of seventeen. He turns the page feverishly; he turns it back again; his conscience isn‘t easy; he must be sorry he put off to the last minute a task he should have finished at leisure long ago, or else some expected difficulty has arisen and he has suddenly found himself obliged to revise everything he did prepare, the lecture he thought he wouldn‘t need to bother about, having cheerfully given it year in year out since he got his job! There‘s a certain genuine distinction about him and a look of unmistakable integrity. (Butor Change 38- 39)

This passage continues for another few paragraphs, and ultimately turns into

Delmont‘s appraisal of his own job. Here we can see how Butor has structured his novel to include a great deal of self-inspection by a character who is, in effect, simply talking to himself. The story about the professor, his housing situations, his family life, his work schedule, gives rise to information about the narrator, his wife and children; we find out he would rather have a firstborn son, that his daughter is not doing well in school, all interwoven with suppositions about a stranger on a train. Indeed, this sort of storymaking is principally used to highlight the situations in Delmont‘s own life, rather than to gain true pictures of the lives of the other passengers (Spencer 67).

Perhaps most interestingly, we have another narrator in charge of his own story, who is not a hero. Delmont has not made himself look better in situations, but rather deals with them more honestly. In one scene, Delmont arran ges to

69 have his wife and his lover meet. As Spencer explains: ―In a brilliant scene, worthy of the psychological novel at its best, the two women are introduced by

Delmont in order that they may at least establish friendly terms, thus facilitating his task when the final break comes…The evening turns into a huge success for the two women and into a total disaster for Delmont, since the mutual esteem of

Cécile and Henriette is matched only by what he imagines to be their common contempt for him…(65) Spencer goes on to point out that Dulmont‘s inferior feelings are exacerbated by Cécile‘s comment about Henriette: ―She‘s far more broadminded than you, and you can stop deluding yourself––you‘re no longer all-important to her.‖ (Butor Change 161) There is no personal commentary by

Delmont in this case. He takes what he gets, perhaps what he deserves for his absurd notion that his wife will take abandonment better if she is friends with his mistress. This is clearly another case of the fiction being made more realistic by the refusal to idealize the subject, something that I think all our Nouveaux

Romanciers are striving to instill in all their characters.

Simply Beckett

In the broadest sense, Beckett‘s characters have been most affectionately known as existential bums on the dirt road of modern life. In a more specific sense, his characters are of the disintegrating type. They all seem to be marching

70 toward the same end, shuffling their mortal coils to bits and pieces along the way.

All of Beckett‘s characters get top billing in his prose. The titles of his novels all feature the lead characters‘ names: Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone dies, Mercier and

Camier and let‘s not forget the one who cannot be named, The Unnamable. This brings the characters to our attention immediately. We are not reading a novel, we are reading the character, which is no surprise when we find how much we are in the mind of the characters, especially in the Trilogy. Yet, in contrast to the character consciousness portrayed by in the Nouveau Roman, Beckett‘s characters are very self aware, as we will see later.

While Beckett does not have the viewer-istic style of Robbe-Grillet, nor the penchant for displaying inner movements that Sarraute exhibits, his characters have more than a few things stylistically in common with the children of the

Nouveau Roman, as I will show.

At the most basic level, Beckett‘s characters seem almost less experimentally drawn than those of the other authors we are studying. For example, because the novels are either third person or first person narrations, they may appear much less nouveau at first glance. There are no hidden perspectives or characters, and no underlying agenda driving the formation of character. There is either a story about a guy, as in Murphy and Watt, or there is a guy telling his story, as in the Trilogy. Actually there is even a none-guy telling

71 his story in The Unnamable, which is slightly akin to Robbe-Grillet‘s narrator husband in Jealousy. But that is where the simplicity of Beckett‘s characters ends.

Most of the Beckettians are telling tales. Whether it is their own story, as with Molloy, or stories they have made up about what we might call ―fictional‖ people, Beckett‘s minions are always composing. Malone spins tales about Sapo,

Lemuel, the Lamberts, and Macmann. The Unnamable tells us about Basil, who becomes Mahood, and let‘s not forget Worm. Even those telling their own stories, Molloy and Moran, are recounting the tales after they have been completed, in effect making them inventions like the others.

This writing of one‘s own story is, of course, something we have seen with the Nouveau Roman, but the degree of self-reflexive writing is unique to Beckett.

For this reason, there is a self-consciousness in Beckett‘s fictions, that we have not seen in the works of our other authors. For example, Molloy tells us:―…I found my bicycle (I didn‘t know I had one) in the same place I must have left it.

Which enables me to remark that, crippled though I was, I was no mean cyclist, at that period. This is how I went about it. I fastened my crutches to the cross- bar, one to either side, I propped the foot of my stiff leg (I forget which, now they‘re both stiff) on the projecting front axle, and I pedalled with the other.‖

This is just one of many descriptions, included perhaps more for their humorous impact than for any furthering of the story, or any more realistic portrayal of the character. Yet, we would not expect to see this in any of Sarraute‘s works, or in

Robbe-Grillet‘s most serious works.

Like Jacques Revel in Butor‘s Passing Time, Beckett‘s characters know they are composing. For example, in Malone Dies, Malone is both commenting on his present state, and composing stories. In his fictional compositions, we find revisions, such as ―then Lemuel took it from him and struck him with it over and over again, no, that won‘t work, then Lemuel called a keeper by the name of

Pat…‖ (Beckett Three Novels 275). This sort of reworking of the story is not confined to Malone‘s fictional compositions, but also comes out in the telling of his own tale: ―When my chamber-pot is full, I put it on the table, beside the dish.

Then I go twenty-four hours without a pot. No, I have two pots. They have thought of everything‖ (Beckett Three Novels 185). A reader might suppose that there is little difference between reporting and improvising, that one is no more important than the other. This refusal to privilege ―real‖ over fantasy brings to mind Robbe-Grillet‘s Mathias, and the fact that the reader can hardly tell what has really occurred in his life and what is the product of the killer‘s sick psyche.

Beckett‘s characters seem to be either writing or dying, one or the other 4.

From the first page of Molloy we find he is being paid for writing, as someone unknown to Molloy takes his pages and brings him money. Later we find this excerpt from Molloy:

And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that‘s not like me, but, how shall I say, I don‘t know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don‘t know what that means but it‘s the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly

business looks like what is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery. 13

Here Molloy is conscious of his self, his choice of words, of the act of writing, of living and dying. Words are equated with the water that drowns, and the laws of the mind are nothing without the ability to utter them aloud. In comparison to

Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet, Beckett gives the inner world, the outer world, and the fantasy world all at the same time.

Storytelling is as important as writing to Beckett‘s characters. Malone has a plan from the start: ―I think I shall be able to tell myself four stories, each one on a different theme. One about a man, another about a woman, a third about a thing and finally one about an animal, a bird probably‖ (Beckett Three Novels

181). But later, it is his writing that becomes suspect, something that cannot be trusted: ―A thousand little things to report, very strange, in view of my situation, if I interpret them correctly. But my notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record‖ (259). Beckett‘s characters are either saved by writing or tortured by it. Is it their job, or their punishment, to tell tales? Hard to tell. Yet they all go on composing.

In The Unnamable we find a very interesting relationship to writing:

―How, in such conditions, can I write, to consider only the manual aspect of that bitter folly? I don‘t know. I could know. But I shall not know. Not this time. It is I who write, who cannot raise my hand from my knee. It is I who think, just enough to write, whose head is far‖ (301). The obligation to write is not always within the control of the Beckettians. Indeed, the mystery of composition barely

74 outweighs its ―bitter folly‖ and yet the writing, the storytelling is what they want most to control. Later, the Unnamable states: ―I shall not say I again, ever again, it‘s too farcical. I shall put in its place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it. Anything to please them. It will make no difference. Where I am there is no one but me, who am not. So much for that. Words, he says he knows they are words. But how can he know, who has never heard anything else.

True‖ (355). The proclamation is made with intention, then just as quickly called into question. This kind of wordplay is characteristic of Beckett; just as he has characters who are all caught up in their very existence, he is all caught up in the thing that gives them that existence, language.

And Beckett‘s characters are not only responsible for telling their own stories, but Beckett‘s stories as well. Moran states, ―Oh the stories I could tell you, if I were easy. What a rabble in my head, what a gallery of moribunds.

Murphy, Watt, Yerk, Mercier and all the others. I would never have believed that––yes, I believe it willingly. Stories, stories. I have not been able to tell them.

I shall not be able to tell this one.‖ (137) And it is not just telling the tales of the others that our Beckettians get up to. The Unnamable declares:

First I‘ll say what I‘m not, that‘s how they taught me to proceed, then what I am, it‘s already under way, I have only to resume at the point where I let myself be cowed. I am neither, I needn‘t say, Murphy, nor Watt, nor Mercier, nor––no, I can‘t even bring myself to name them, nor any of the others whose very names I forget, who told me I was they, who I must have tried to be, under duress, or through fear, or to avoid acknowledging me, not the slightest connexion. (326)

Can we infer from this quote that Beckett‘s characters are also living each other‘s stories? It is convenient to suppose that, in the Trilogy, we might have an evolution of character. Moran could become Molloy, and Malone might die and become the Unnamable. After all, the Trilogy should be a closed system with a definite relationship between the three parts. But is Beckett im plying here that all his characters, even those from other novels, are the same?

1 There is an entire aspect of ambiguity that is lost in the direct translation of this title.

The French word jalousie means window blind.

2 Vivian Mercier tells us ―Virtually every moment of Mathias‘s first day on an island off the coast of France is accounted for, at least from the time when his ferryboat begins its approach to the island landing slip to the moment when he just misses the same oat returning to the mainland six hours later. Yet nearly an hour of that time is not directly narrated in its chronological order.‖ (190) This would be the most important hour of the novel, almost as the husband is the most important character of Jealousy, because it is in this hour that Mathias tortures and kills thirteen year-old Jacqueline. It is also the hour that Mathias spends all his time trying to cover up.

3 We must not overlook the fact that Sarraute leaves thoughts about her technique everywhere. In the passage discussing Tolstoy‘s War and Peace we find this:

Far cleverer men than I might break both tooth and nail in some such insolent attempt to grapple with Prince Bolkonski, or with Princess Maria. For it should not be forgotten that they are really somebody. They belong among those characters in fiction who are so successfully portrayed that we are accustomed to refer to them as ―real,‖ or ―alive,‖ more real and more alive, in fact, than the living themselves. (67)

Clearly, her character has fallen into the trap of the ancients, believing the well drawn characters to be more real than life itself. Has Sarraute written this as an ironic aside, or rather as a clever illustration of her point?

4 Hoffman writes ―The matter of dying in Beckett‘s work is basically a question of self- inventory: Who is it that is dying? How may he identify himself if he is to die? How may he die ‗significantly‘?‖ (51) Is this why Beckett‘s characters must compose? Do they need to be recognized as the one who has died? Do they believe that the tale left behind will make their passing more significant?

CHAPTER THREE: NARRATIVE

The claim that the Nouveaux Romanciers were not writing true novels because they were not telling stories, was a claim that the writers felt th ey could take on. In the formulation of their novels, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Butor took great steps in the innovation of plot and narrative structure. They were telling stories, just not in the way that anyone was used to seeing. Beckett‘s middle name was innovation where form and narrative are concerned. Murphy could be considered his last rather normal novel, and it was not all that normal to begin with. By the time he got to the Trilogy, Beckett made no bones about doing exactly what he wanted with his novels.

Robbe-Grillet‘s Subversions

Robbe-Grillet took liberties with plot and structure right from the start.

His first novel The Erasers, published in French in 1953, took as its model the detective novel. The usual structure of this type of novel includes a crime, an investigation, and a dénouement which includes the detective solving the crime and catching the perpetrator. Robbe-Grillet diverged from this model in the prologue. The reader is indeed treated to a crime and is even told who the

78 perpetrator is, but soon finds that the dead man is not really dead. Divulging this information at the start of the novel releases the reader from the usual commitment to the unfolding detective narrative. The reader knows more than the detective as far as the principal mystery is concerned, but they are both equally in the dark as far as the second mystery is concerned. For the reader, the secondary plot does not unfold until much later in the novel. The detective,

Wallas, turns out to be the son of the not-so-murdered man, Daniel Dupont. This storyline does not compromise the detective narrative in and of itself. The detective narrative is blown only by fact that the not-so-murdered man is eventually murdered by the detective who is ostensibly trying to solve the crime he ends up committing 1. Thus Robbe-Grillet subverts the main detective plot line by concealing a second and more mysterious mystery.

Robbe-Grillet sums up the matter of the story in the publisher‘s press release. The blurb reads:

The subject is a definite, concrete, essential event: a man‘s death. It is a detective story event––that is, there is a murderer, a detective, a victim. In one sense, their roles are conventional: the murderer shoots the victim, the detective solves the problem, the victim dies. But the ties which bind them only appear clearly once the last chapter ends. For the book is nothing more than the account of the twenty-four hours that ensue between the pistol shot and the death, the time the bullet takes to travel three or four yards––twenty-four hours ―in excess.‖ (qtd. in Morrissette Novels 41-42)

This quote reiterates my observations above, and points out one important fact.

The novel is structured, as Robbe-Grillet states, as ―the account of…twenty-four hours.‖ But Bruce Morrissette points out that there are actually two twenty-four

79 hour periods operating in and around this text. The prologue begins at 6:00 a.m. and the epilogue ends at 6:00 a.m. the following morning. This is the first twenty-four hour construct which includes the text outside the main body, i.e. the prologue and epilogue. The original pseudo-murder takes place here.

Morrissette explains that, ―the action of the main plot has begun with a pistol shot at 7:30 p.m. of the evening before the morning of the prologue, and is concluded with a second (and fatal) shot fired at 7:30 p.m. of the evening before the morning of the epilogue‖ (42). With the addition of this second twenty-four hour construct Robbe-Grillet creates a situation that mirrors the dual plotlines, in that one is operating within the conventional confines of the novel proper, while the other begins and ends outside what is considered to be convention. This must be the ―in excess‖ of the blurb above. The epilogue is the closing of the circle that began in the prologue. The original pseudo-murder, which had taken place even before the prologue, has been reinstated as a real murder which necessarily took place in the final pages, before the extra-narrative epilogue.

Robbe-Grillet‘s next novel The Voyeur is also structured on a similar premise of a circular plot. Mathias returns to an island where he lived as a child in order to sell watches. The novel begins with Mathias‘ arrival on the island and ends with his departure. He makes two circuits of the island in the time he is there. Although the plot seems to progress in a chronological fashion, the style of the novel prohibits it from being read in such a simple way. The shift of point of view from interior to exterior, from past to present, from reality to fantasy

80 makes it impossible to read the novel in a straight forward manner. To make things more interesting we must add to these complications the heavy use of repetition, where scenes show up again and again, slightly altered and layered with meaning, as well as imagined scenes which are barely recognizable as such.

For example, Mathias visualizes selling watches before he even leaves the boat.

He calculates it should take him no more than four minutes to make a sale and then the reader is led through the sale of a watch in ―the last house on the road to the big lighthouse as you leave town‖ (Robbe-Grillet Voyeur 25). This scene is interspersed with the slow disembarkation of the passengers from the ship. We are at once in the kitchen with the lady of the house as Mathias pretends to know her brother, and making our way carefully down the slimy gangplank. This entire episode is seven pages long, spanning pages 25 through 31, while the real scene of his trying to sell watches at that particular house does not take place until page 66 and following. This scene is only the first and, perhaps the most basic of Mathias‘ elaborations. The constant shifting of our focus from real to imaginary, keeps the narrative from ever appearing to be chronologically delivered.

Time is very important to the structure of The Voyeur. Not only is our man

Mathias a watch salesman who is obsessed with how many sales he can make in how many minutes, he is also a murderer who must try to account for his every moment in order to create an alibi. Thus we progress from the four minute calculation mentioned above as Mathias leaves the ship to such further ones as

He made a quick calculation of how much time remained until the boat left: barely five hours, from which he would have to subtract the time taken by the intervals on the bicycle: one hour at the most was enough to allow for a distance totaling no more than ten miles (unless he was mistaken). Thus he had about four hours at his disposal for sales (and refusals); that is, two hundred forty minutes…[H]e would get through most refusals in a few seconds. As for sales, he would have to count on an average of ten minutes for each one, which would reasonably include brief expeditions on foot in the villages. On this basis his two hundred and forty minutes represented the sale of twenty-four watches––perhaps not the most expensive ones but, for instance, the series at one hundred fifty or one hundred seventy crowns, on an average, with a profit…

This figuring down to the minute and the cent represents Mathias‘ attempts to control his world as it gets more and more out of control. The length of time spent on these machinations continues to grow as we pass into the second part of the book, as it becomes a case of alibi rather than success in sales.

It is very interesting to note that the most consequential event is never directly written into the novel. This hour that is missing, that is represented by a blank unnumbered page between parts one and two, contains the torture and murder of a thirteen year old girl. Because the narrative is so much about what is happening in the mind and viewpoint of Mathias, this blank space has great repercussions on the narrative itself. Are we to assume that Mathias committed his crime in a blacked out state, that he does not remember what he has done?

How else can the reader explain the careful handling of every other moment in the narrative, sans this one hour. Or, should we assume that Mathias is innocent because he has no knowledge of the crime? This is impossible to believe if only because of the lengths to which Mathias goes to figure out his whereabouts for

82 the missing hour. If we cannot answer these questions, at least we can use them to highlight the great interdependence of form and content in this and other works.

One narrative aspect that is found almost exclusively in the works of

Robbe-Grillet is the special treatment of objects. This writer, above all the others, has been accused of Chosisme, and the high level of thingness is usually what is pointed out first about the works of Robbe-Grillet. We explored his use of the objective correlative in the character chapter, yet this is something different altogether. Roland Barthes sums up the most important questions surrounding

Robbe-Grillet‘s use of objects in his preface to Morrissette‘s The Novels of Robbe-

Grillet. He writes:

We know that the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet illustrate the problem of the literary object: are things ind icators of meaning, or are they, on the contrary, opaque? Can, or should, a writer describe an object without assigning to it some human transcendency? Meaningful or meaningless, what is the function of objects in a novel? How does the manner in which they are described affect the meaning of the story, the consistency of the characters, or even the relationship of the work to the idea of literature?

These are the main points, in a nutshell, that one would hit upon concerning

Robbe-Grillet and objects. While we will never answer all of them, we can take a brief look at a few examples of how objects are used in the works of Robbe-

Grillet.

In his third novel Jealousy, Robbe-Grillet uses description almost as another character. The place the characters occupy becomes as important, at times, as the characters themselves. For example, Jealousy begins with a map of

83 the location where the story takes place, complete with detailed legend. We can recognize how the plantation is situated, where the ―road to h ighway‖ is, as well as the location of the banana trees. The house itself is more detailed. Thus we find Roman Numeral 1 on the diagram stands for the ―Southwest pillar and its shadow at the beginning of the novel.‖ We are shown the locations of A…‘s room and its contents, including bed, chest, dressing table, writing table, etc. We know there is a picture of A… in the study and where the important ―mark of centipede on wall‖ is located in the living room.

This precise documentation of the placement of objects is included to help the observant begin to realize there is a character missing in all descriptions. The reader who keenly studies this map will find that under Roman Numeral 2, the

Veranda, we have numbers 1 through 5 which denote the location of the chairs and the cocktail table. Each of the numbers is given a designation: 1 = Franck‘s chair, 2 = A…‘s chair, 3 = Empty chair, and 5 = Cocktail table. There does exist a number 4, but it is not mentioned in the legend at all. Thus, objects are really all we know about the narrator of this novel. Although they are not given meaning beyond what they are, they are still the only thing that signifies the presence of the husband.

In totally different way, sometimes Robbe-Grillet uses objects only for their own sake. One of the most celebrated bits of description in Robbe-Grillet‘s novels occurs in The Erasers and involves a tomato:

A quarter of tomato that is quite faultless, cut up by the machine into a perfectly symmetrical fruit.

The peripheral flesh, compact, homogenous, and a splendid chemical red, is of an even thickness between a strip of gleaming skin and the hollow where the yellow, graduated seeds appear in a row, kept in place by a thin layer of greenish jelly along a swelling of the heart. This heart, of a slightly grainy, faint pink, begins––toward the inner hollow––with a cluster of white veins, one of which extends toward the seeds––somewhat uncertainly. Above, a scarcely perceptible accident has occurred: a corner of the skin, stripped back from the flesh for a fraction of an inch, is slightly raised. 153-154

These three paragraphs are set off from the rest of the text by white space before and after. This elevates the tomato from a lowly bit of description that is lumped in with events to something more important. It is as if the tomato has a life of its own, exists only for itself, outside of the story. Nothing else on the plate is given such special attention, although we have been told there is bread and fish and hardboiled eggs. We don‘t even have Wallas in the frame with the tomato, although we know he must surely be there. Barthes has this to say about the tomato: ―A slice of tomato in an automat sandwich, described according to this method, constitutes an object without heredity, without associations, and without references, an object rigorously confined to the order of its components, and refusing with all the stubbornness of thereness to involve the reader in an elsewhere, whether functional or substantial‖ (Alain Robbe-Grillet 115). Here we find the phenomenological experience of the object. No need for Wallas to validate the tomato‘s existence, any more than it could give meaning to his existence.

In other places, Robbe-Grillet‘s love of description goes much further. For example, in The Voyeur we find this passage:

The scene is lit by an oil lamp in the middle of the long, blackish - brown table. Also on the table, between the lamp and the window, are two white plates next to each other––the dark glass prevents any certainty as to the color of the liquid filling it. The rest of the table is clear, marked only with a few shadows: the huge, distorted one cast by the bottle, a crescent underlining the plate nearest the window, a large spot surrounding the lamp base. Behind the table, in the room‘s right corner (the one farthest away), the big kitchen stove against the rear wall can be discerned by an orange glow from the open ash-drawer. Two people are standing face to face: Jean Robin––called Pierre–– and, much shorter than he, the young woman of unknown identity. Both are on the other side of the table (in relation to the window), he to the left––that is, in front of the window ––she at the opposite end of the table, near the stove. Between them and the table––running its whole length but concealed from view by it––is the bench. The entire room is thus cut up into a network of parallel lines: first the back wall, against which, at the right, are the stove and several boxes, and at the left, in shadow, some more important piece of furniture; next, at an unspecifiable distance from this wall, the line determined by the man and the woman; then, still advancing toward the front of the room, the invisible bench, the central axis of the rectangular table–– including the oil lamp and the opaque bottle––and the window itself. Cutting across this system by perpendiculars, from front to back, the following elements can be discerned: the central upright of the window, the shadow crossing the second plate, the bottle, the man (Jean Robin, or Pierre), a crate set upright on the floor; then, a yard to the right, the lighted oil lamp; and about a yard farther, the end of the table, the young woman of unspecified identity, and the left side of the stove. 191-192

Here we can see many things going on. The language describing this scene is clinical. There are few judgements about the contents of the room, no superfluous adjectives beyond the color of certain things: the table, the plates, and the glow from the stove. Indeed the language is almost mathematical in

86 nature. A grid is set up as first the scene is ―cut up into a network of parallel lines‖ and later completed by the horizontal lines ―cutting across this system by perpendiculars.‖ The table is the central axis, and the man even becomes part of the grid. It is also a very visual moment, drawn like a painting or perhaps a cinematic scene.

The point of view is that of Mathias who is mentioned in the paragraph directly preceding the one I have quoted; he does not appear again, directly, for eight paragraphs after the last one above. Indeed, the scene goes on in the same objective manner even though it is describing an argument between two people.

For Robbe-Grillet, people are just a part of the scenery, deserving no more attention than the furniture around them. These two people are clearly already objects in the passage above as they join the table and the lamp and the bench, all pieces of the grid that Robbe-Grillet is weaving. Although the man has a name, or two to be exact, these operate more as a title, similar to that of the woman‘s: identity unknown.

Each of the examples above illustrate a different way in which Robbe-

Grillet uses objects in his works. As we have seen, time and time again, the other

Nouveaux Romanciers do not necessarily see the world the same way. The form and structure of Nathalie Sarraute‘s works, on the surface, are not as spectacular as those discussed above, as we shall see.

Sarraute‘s Plotting

Plot is not a word usually associated with the early works of Nathalie

Sarraute. Things do happen, small events take place, but the usual progression of a storyline is not what Portrait of a Man Unknown, Martereau, or even The

Planetarium are really about. Portrait is about the narrator‘s obsession with the father and daughter pair. That which takes place in the mind is the matter of the novel. Or rather the tropisms that are created by the interactions between the narrator and the objects of his obsession are what the book is about. It is easy to see how critics would take issue with these novels on the basis of narrative alone.

However, Sarraute‘s plan is evident: To allow the reader no safe haven, no familiar terrain which might lull the reader into a certain unquestion ing complacency. For this reason alone there are very few of the usual outward vestiges of story in the first novels of Sarraute. Instead we have a progression of the obsession.

It is necessary to take a different tack when exploring the narrative structure of Portrait of a Man Unknown. Jean-Paul Sartre gives us this synopsis in his forward:

In fact, it is a parody on the novel of ‗quest‘ into which the author has introduced a sort of impassioned amateur detective who becomes fascinated by a perfectly ordinary couple––an old father and a daughter who is no longer very young––spies on them, pursues them and occasionally sees through them, even at a distance, by virtue of a sort of thought transference, without ever knowing very well either what he is after or what they are. (Sarraute Portrait viii)

This is a good summation of what happens in the novel. Although most of the narrative time is spent in exploring the narrator‘s emotions, or his imaginings, the narrator does go to a few places, to see a ―specialist,‖ and to a museum, for example. Let‘s take a moment to look at these two scenes where the narrative does flow in a way that might be distinguishable as plot.

The episode with the ―specialist‖ is presented in its own unnumbered chapter which sets it off from the rest of the narrative. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is why it is easier to follow its progression as a block of narrative. The scene is right up Sarraute‘s alley. First of all, it is a discussion of the mind of the narrator and about the father/ daughter. Secondly, the interview is within the strict control of the narrator. The chapter begins with the narrator saying ―I‘ve given up. I‘ve handed myself over bound hand and foot‖ (Portrait

71). We don‘t know what it means until we turn the page. The next paragraph begins, ―In such cases as mine, the stubborn cases that have failed to react to ordinary raps, or to the idle gaze of someone who is not interested in these things, they resort to specialists‖ (72). This perennial ―they‖ has driven the narrator to the present situation, yet he soon regains control. The scene continues with ―I must say for mine, the one I went to, it was I myself who put him on the right track.‖ In the next paragraph he admits, ―I told him everything, just as it came, the best I could, especially the ‗scenes‘ between them, that moment when they confront each other, that attracts me and which I fall into like a dark hole; the way they have, too, of springing up from nowhere, and the

89 painful fascination they always exert upon me‖ (73). This is the entire plot of the novel in miniature. To further this storyline, the narrator is reassured by the specialist that he is normal, but it is everyone else who is the problem. He is even rather bored by our narrator‘s descriptions of his problem, and his visit ends with the narrator stating, ―Before rising to leave, I attempt to make a clean breast of everything. But I feel that he is growing a little bit impatient, really he hasn‘t got the time…‖ (74). Thus, the narrator‘s summation is that if he were truly being unreasonable, the doctor would have reacted more strongly, would have insisted he return for more intensive therapy sessions. The scene ends with the narrator, in effect, returning to an earlier childlike state. He is escorted away by his parents, ―crossing the square where I had once made mudpies at their feet‖ (76) and for the moment he is dependent upon them. The chapter ends.

When we accept that the plot of the novel is the narrator‘s preoccupations, it is much easier to follow the narrative flow. In the above example, Sarraute has taken the character out of his usual ramblings and confined him in a scene that will explain to the reader what is going on, and perhaps illustrate the way the narrative is dependent on the narrator‘s thoughts and beliefs. With this in mind let‘s look at the next example, the trip to the museum.

Directly after the event described above, in the next chapter, we find the description of the gallery where the main character has gone to view the picture of the novel‘s title. We read:

I know now that the ambivalence I spoke of was already there, hidden away, without a doubt, in the excitement I felt as I climbed

the steps of the museum, an excitement in which a slight apprehension mingled with excessive cheerfulness––a feeling somewhat similar to that of a lover hastening to his first tryst. The galleries were silent and deserted. A delicate, ashen light flowed from the glass ceilings onto the wide, glossy floors. I walked slowly about, drinking it all in, making long stops before my favorite canvases. Here, too, one had only to let oneself go and take what was offered. All effort, all doubt, all anxiety, had now been overcome and were things of the past; the goal had been reached. The pictures let me share the fertile, grave serenity of their peaceful smile, the exquisite grace of their detachment. Their lines, each one of which seemed to be unique among all possible lines, miraculously chosen and come upon through some supernatural, unhoped-for stoke of luck, entered into me and set me right. I was tense and vibrant, like the taut string of a bow. (Sarraute Portrait 83)

Here we see that, instead of describing the gallery, its hallways, paintings, and inhabitants, Sarraute has once again furnished the reader only with the experience of narrator. Thus, our description of the outside of the museum reflects the emotions the character feels upon climbing the stairs, slight apprehension and excessive cheerfulness, like a lover to his first tryst. Our picture of the interior is his as well. Even the light, which would seem to be objectively drawn and stand alone, becomes part of him as we find he is

―drinking it all in.‖ This draught seems to have some effect upon our narrator, as he is again removed from his situation, as in the specialist‘s office, and allowed to forget his obsessions for the moment. The emotions that arise in response to his obsessions, ―all effort, all doubt, all anxiety,‖ can be put behind him as they become ―things of the past.‖ This frees him, at least for his stay in the museum.

This freedom allows the paintings to work upon our narrator. They are quickly anthropomorphized and become intimately connected with him. They let our main character share the ―serenity‖ of their ―peaceful smile‖ and the

―grace of their detachment,‖ perhaps the detachment our narrator cannot achieve by himself. Their very lines become part of our narrator as he says they ―entered into me and set me right.‖ They seemingly improve him. He becomes ―tense and vibrant,‖ as if he were the colors of a painting himself.

The scene continues till the narrator is in front of the ―Portrait of a Man

Unknown.‖ Here is the title of our work, the focus that Sarraute h as picked for her novel. The painting itself is outside our main character‘s purview. It has no background, being unsigned, the painter unknown. The subject is, of course, unknown as well. Here is our narrator‘s description of the piece:

This time it seemed to me, if anything, even more curious than it had been before. The lines of the face, the lace jabot and waistcoat, as also the hands, seemed to present the kind of fragmentary, uncertain outlines that the hesitant fingers of a blind man might come upon haltingly, feeling his way. It was as though all effort, all doubt, all anxiety had been overtaken by a sudden catastrophe, and had remained congealed in action, like corpses that have petrified in the position they were in when death overtook them. The eyes alone seemed to have escaped the catastrophe and achieved fulfillment. It was as though they had attracted and concentrated in themselves all the intensity, all the life that was lacking in the still formless, dislocated features. In fact they seemed not quite to belong to this face; they made one thing of the eyes of those enchanted beings in fairy tales in whose bodies princes and princesses are held captive by a charm. Their distressing, insistent entreaty made one strangely aware of his silence and the tragedy of it. (84)

Besser explicates the above description in this way: ―Everything about the subject is vague, fragmented, uncertain; the outlines are sketchy, as if groped for haltingly by a blind man. Only the eyes appear finished, concentrating in their intense gaze all the life that is missing from the other, half-formed features. They rivet the narrator‘s attention with their insistent and silent appeal.

Simultaneously, he experiences a sudden feeling of liberation and joy‖ (45). The narrator is moved by the painting to a new state. It is interesting that the same effort, doubt, and anxiety that had been overcome in the narrator, is transformed by catastrophe in the painting‘s subject. One must wonder if the narrator would have become the corpse he describes if he had not experienced the change that the paintings have caused.

The final paragraph of the chapter explains this change: ―Suddenly I felt free. Liberated. The Unknown Man––I said to myself as I dashed up the hotel stairs––―The Man with the Waistcoat,‖ as I called him, had liberated me. Like a blow torch, the flame that burned inside him had melted the chain by which they had held me in leash. I was free…‖ (Sarraute Portrait 85). Once again, all that goes on in the novel is subject to the constraints of the narrator‘s obsession. He renames the painting, thus putting it under his control. The change engendered by the painting is a change in the relationship of the watcher and the watched, a lessening of the control his obsession has upon him. The narrative is furthered here by the evolution that the narrator experiences after this trip to the museum.

As with characterization, plot is more pronounced in The Planetarium.

When the cast multiplied and the narrative technique shifted to reflect numerous points of view, so too, the narrative matter grew to encompass not one, but two storylines. The first plot involves the aunt‘s apartment, its decoration and the desire of Alain to possess it. The second plot revolves around Alain‘s relationship with the writer Germaine Lemaire, and his struggle to get into her good graces. But let‘s not be fooled into thinking the presence of a storyline indicates any shift from Sarraute‘s main purpose. Sarraute herself had this to say about the novel:

In this last book, The Planetarium, the commonplaces behind which the tropisms hide, the platitudes, the clichés, constitute the plot itself. Nothing could be more commonplace than this plot. An old lady wants to put a new oak door in her flat. A young man tries to become one of the favourites of a well-known writer. But the tropisms, which make our lives infinitely rich and complex, hide under any commonplace gesture or word. They can be found anywhere at any moment. Why, then, d escribe exceptional situations, great action, heroes? Is it not a deception? Why try and persuade the reader that all the richness, the complexity of life is concentrated in certain chosen actions instead of going on in him, whatever he is doing, just as he goes on doing all day long in ordinary life?‖ (―New Movements‖ 429)

The banality of the narrative is necessary to showcase the subterraneous emotions that move us at any given moment. To provide epic situations in which to couch these stirrings would only detract from the reader‘s ability to grasp them. In the ambitious work that is The Planetarium a narrative structure would become necessary to frame the interactions of the several characters, but would not become important beyond that functional role. In the end, the

94 elements of the plot, itself, become unimportant. There is no great climax to end the novel, Alain‘s possession of the apartment is just a thing that comes to pass, and his desire to ingratiate himself to Lemaire no longer dictates his every word and gesture. These elements of plot are quietly done away with, but the novel actually ends when the tropisms are finished.

Butor‘s Timeliness

The works of Michel Butor are perhaps the most traditionally structured narratives of any of that we are studying. The novel Passing Time is structured on the journal form, which is itself dependent on the past. The title in the original French, L’Emploi du temps, implies a train schedule. The narrative is bound by the year that Revel is spending in Bleston, as well as by the dates that he chooses to put down in his notebook. Although the year has not finished, the reader perceives that the journal will continue only to the point where Revel returns to France that there would be no need to work out the events in Bleston once he quits the town.

Despite its dependence on time, chronology will not be strictly followed in this novel. Roudiez points out this conundrum:

[Revel] will keep a diary; he cannot, however begin with the events of the first of May, for if those events are to be understood they must be presented in the context of previous events. Unfortunately for him, the present does not stand still, and things keep occurring

that throw a different light on what he has already told. Some things must then be retold, as past and present continuously interact; the pages of his diary become more and more confused from both logical and chronological points of view. (14)

This confusion is physically evidenced by the double dates that occupy th e top of each page. Revel must report the day he is writing on, as well as the day that he is writing about. These temporal overlaps add richness to each period that Revel writes about as he adds more information gained from subsequent events, and consequently a deeper understanding is created both for the narrator and for the reader.

In the world that Butor has created for his narrator, time is fluid. Late in the novel, Revel writes:

Thus the sequence of former days is only restored to us through a whole host of other days, constantly changing, and every event calls up an echo from the other, earlier events which caused it or explain it, or correspond to it, every monument, every object, every image sending us back to other periods which we must reaw aken in order to recover the lost secret of their power for good or evil, other periods often remote and forgotten, whose density and distance are to be measured not by weeks or months but by our whole history, for beyond the limits of our year together, Bleston… (Passing Time 305)

Again, the augmentation of one time period with the knowledge gained from later occurrences is necessary for complete understanding. The sum total of all the experiences of a life can only be apprehended at a moment near the end of that life; so the total understanding of the year in Bleston can only be achieved after time has passed.

The temporal shifts in this novel make the plot something that must be figured out right along with the date. Threads of significance from myth , made up art, and detective novels are used to enhance the mystery that Revel thinks he must solve. The novel might simply be about Revel‘s coming to terms with living in a foreign country, about his acclimating to the customs and mores of a strange culture. It is doubtful that it works on the level of a simple mystery which Revel is trying to solve; rather the murder works as a backdrop for his movements through the town and his interactions with the people. Add to these two threads the narrator‘s struggle with romance, the strange fires that pop up now and again, and the whole plot line surrounding George Burton and his book and it soon appears that there are too many storylines in this work, to ever pick out which one is dominant.

The structure of Butor‘s next novel A Change of Heart, is based on the length of a train ride from Paris to Rome. The narrator of the novel never leaves the train, although his memories, fabrications, and dreams which make up the action of the novel are not physically located there. In a sense, the novel is confined in a space yet free in a temporal sense. For the memories of Delmont are free to unfold, as are his suppositions about the future. And the most important matter of the novel, the one we are set up to expect by the title, is

Delmont‘s change of heart, which has no physical place either. This release of action into the realm of thought has allowed Butor to weave structure and plot together.

The novel‘s structure is also based on the numerous levels of time, m uch like Passing Time. Mcwilliams has figured out that the novel is ―organized in seven temporal layers: the present, Delmont‘s projected hopes for the future, and five sequences of memories from the past‖ (39). It is through these layers that the whole cloth of the plot is delivered. We are rarely simply on the train. Instead we might be with Delmont the first time he met Cécile in Rome, or years earlier with Delmont and his wife on their honeymoon in Rome. We might also be in

Delmont‘s imagination when he arrives at the end of his train trip and surprises

Cécile who does not expect him or in one of Delmont‘s strangely gothic and disturbing dreams. And when it seems as if we are simply on the train, Delmont quickly begins making up stories about his fellow passengers, which thrusts us again into the realm of thought. But the final dénouement, Delmont‘s decision to stay with his wife and not see Cécile at all when he gets to Rome, is not located anywhere at all.

Clearly, in the novels of the Nouveaux Romanciers it does very little good to give a basic summation of the plot. One could never get the full impact of any of these works just by recounting what happens in the story.

Beckett Matters

Beckett has forgone plot and thrown caution to the wind when it comes to structure. The physical structure of the Trilogy is barely there. There are no chapters breaks, and often not even a paragraph to denote a change of meaning.

There are pages and pages of solid type and, as with the novels of the Nouveau

Roman, one is challenged to find a narrative thread to follow by simply flipping through pages. For a man who was striving toward the blank page, there sure are an awful lot of words in these novels, and yet they all signify very little 2.

More specifically, Molloy is split into two parts, one narrated by Jacques

Moran, although the whole thing is only called Molloy. Both Malone Dies and The

Unnamable are all of one piece, with no chapters and only infrequent breaks of a few lines of white space. Ind eed, after the tenth page in The Unnamable, there is not another paragraph or white space throughout the entire rest of the work. For the last work in the Trilogy is in every sense much more than whatever came before it. Abbot writes about the structure of The Unnamable:

…except for the start and finish of its print, [it] truly has no recognizable beginning or end. It is not properly a ―work‖ at all but rather a segment of process: a constant grinding out of new beginnings from old endings with a countermotion that chews up the new beginnings as they appear…There is no grand finale in sight, not even a demise as in the case of Malone. There are only beginnings, exordia, preambles, undertaken in the hope that they shall lead the speaker to himself. (Three Novels 127-128)

The narrative hopes of the first and second installments of the Trilogy are concrete and discernable when compared to the ramble that is The Unnamable.

Molloy wants to find his mother, Moran wants to find Molloy; Malone simply

99 wants to die. These are the most basic summations of plot. But the plot in The

Unnamable is not so easily discernible. Perhaps the Unnamable simply wants to exist and to figure out his existence, to give it meaning. Molloy says: "For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on" Three Novels 48). But the Unnamable has nowhere ―to stay where he is‖ nor does he have any ―little further on‖ to go to. This means he also doesn‘t have the ―nothing better‖ nor the ―slightly less horrible‖ to hope for.

So even though, plotwise, Molloy and Malone might not make out so well, they have a decided advantage over the Unnamable right from the start.

There is no doubt that disintegration is a narrative device Beckett uses in the Trilogy. Both the physical disintegration of the narrators and the theoretical disintegration of the narrative take place. In the first section, Molloy becomes more and more crippled as his tale unfolds, and Moran, who starts out appearing to be extremely normal and healthful, ends up utterly transformed by the time he returns home. In the next two sections, things start badly and end worse.

Malone is in reduced state from the moment we meet him, in bed and waiting to die. The Unnamable is not characterized in any physical way whatsoever.

Friedman points out in his essay ―Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman,‖ ―As

Malone and the unnamed narrator ram ble on and on disconcertedly, one sees the gradual ‗dissolution of self‘ and the disappearance of an external dimension‖

(Three Novels 28). This lack of external dimension releases Beckett‘s characters,

100 and subsequently the plots which they are a part of, from any kind of realism.

While Sarraute‘s characters might be completely self generating, they at least inhabit and interact with an outside world. And what would Robbe-Grillet do without his concrete and familiar objects 3?

The narrative sequences in the Trilogy are in a way much easier to discern than those of some of our Nouveaux Romanciers. As I stated just a moment ago,

Molloy is on a quest to find his mother. He goes chronologically from point A to point B and he has adventures along the way. Su re some of them are only as exciting as spending a night in a ditch, but that is better than some of his compatriots get. For Malone is bedridden, and the Unnamable is not corporeally situated, as least as far as I can tell. And Malone does get some visitors, like his friend Moll, while the Unnamable must make up his own friends. Yet, the occurrences in these two parts do seem to be built upon succeeding ones, as if there were an actual narrative progression even if there wasn‘t a physical one.

The critics often say that Beckett is writing about nothing. I think it is important to take a moment and focus on this fact because it does have something to do with the Nouveau Roman which was often referred to as anti- literature at the time. In her article ―Samuel Beckett and the Anti-novel,‖ Brooke-

Rose states ―This is also the reason why Beckett‘s works must be anti-novels or anti-plays. The very formulation of nothing into something means that the chosen form is constantly in danger of not being. Hence the slightly surrealistic tricks, of things which are and are not, the detailed and serious treatment of

101 pointless incidents…‖ (44). This follows a discussion of Waiting for Godot, and I would assume that she was referring solely to that minimalist venture, except

Brooke-Rose makes a point of including the novels in her summation, and then follows this quote with a bit from Molloy. She goes on to conclude that ―Every anti-novel, of course, is an attempt to challenge some false reality or other‖ (44-

45). I find this a sweeping and a provocative statement, although I don‘t know it is true. In a like-minded approach Charles Glicksberg has written an article entitled ―The Literature of Silence‖ in which he talks about anti-literature. He states that ―among some modern writers the movement is triggered by a haunting realization of the essential futility of literature. That is why they aim to create anti-literature: works that spell the death of literature‖ (166). I include these brief quotes to stand in for the incredible amount of criticism that exists regarding both Beckett and the Nouveau Roman, which credits these writers with ruining literature in general. Today, it does not seem so serious and I don‘t believe this can be considered the aim of our four writers.

While Beckett‘s works may be difficult to comprehend they still manage to have a sort of beginning, a middle, and a definite end. The endings of the separate parts of the Trilogy are interesting to look at both in the context of structure and narrative. For example, Molloy ends most regularly with this paradox couplet: ―Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight.

The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining‖

(Molloy 176). Without punctuation, it takes a moment to decipher the fact that

102 the narrator is saying he is writing fiction. Yet this is the most conclusive of the three endings. How odd. Malone Dies ends with this:

Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he will not hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it or with it or with it or with or

or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never

or with his pencil or with his stick or

or light light I mean

never there he will never

never anything

there

anymore

Is this slow dissolution the end of us all? Or is it simply the winding down of a narrative that doesn‘t really have an ending? There is no climax involved and one would think that Malone could go on telling tales an interminably long time.

Both Molloy and Malone Dies end in much the same way as they continued as narratives. I am not sure if the same can be said for the special case of The

Unnamable. It is necessary to pick an arbitrary start to the finish of this concluding part of the Trilogy, because there is not a period anywhere for about five pages before the final one.

…you must go on, I can‘t go on, you must go on, I‘ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it‘s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhap s they

103

have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don‘t know, I‘ll never know, in the silence you don‘t know, you must go on, I can‘t go on, I‘ll go on.

There is a feeling that Beckett simply did not write another word here. The

Unnamable is an amorphous narrative at best. One might not even expect to find an ending, nevermind an ending that makes sense. However, I must admit, when I got to the last page, I was relieved to find there was an end to it. I feel almost the same way right now.

1 This killing of the unknown father by the unknown son is, of course, the classical

Oedipus myth. It is interesting to note that the only reader to notice this without further input from the author is supposed to be Samuel Beckett (Mercier 30). If this is true, we have our first indication that he read at least one work of the Nouveaux Romanciers!

2 Melvin J. Friedman writes ―One should not be fooled by the rhetoric which gushes uncontrolledly from the mouths of Beckett‘s monologists; it seems merely to be the literary substitution for silence…‖ (―Samuel Beckett‖ 28). This is reassuring, as Beckett is often characterized as writing ―silent‖ literature.

3 Beckett‘s has an opinion about objects In the Trilogy we find this sentiment: "To restore silence is the role of objects" (Molloy 13). I wonder what Robbe-Grillet would make of it?

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CONCLUSION

I would like to begin this conclusion by highlighting some key points that we can infer from our investigation. First, Beckett was clearly contemporaneous to the writers of the Nouveau Roman. His influences were similar and the tradition that he was reacting to was akin to the one our French writers were rebelling against, while not being exactly the same. Beckett‘s work on Proust contains elements that would not be out of place in the theoretical works of any of the Nouveaux Romanciers. Although he is slightly ahead of the others,

Beckett is still a fellow descendant of a Modernist trend in literature. While

Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute were reading Faulkner and Joyce, Beckett was studying at the master‘s knee. Most of all, I think, these writers all share the desire to find a new way of portraying humankind in literature, a way that is at once more realistic and more honest than anything that was attempted before their time.

Because our writers are beginning from a similar point of contention, I think it is no surprise that their techniques of crafting the novel are similar as well. A new look for the character is present in all these novels. With Robbe-

Grillet‘s cinematic viewpoints, Sarraute‘s interiority, and Butor‘s characters in the

105 throes of their own life and times, Beckett‘s creatures are not any great leap. The existential angst experienced by the cast of the Trilogy seems a natural step in the disintegration of the traditional hero. It is most interesting to find that every one of the characters we have looked at has been writing or telling his or her own story. This can be no mere coincidence. Robbe-Grillet‘s belief that there is something inherently wrong with sounding the depths of the human psyche in order to make pronouncements when returned to the surface fits in with the tendency of these writers to let the characters speak for themselves, while drawing no conclusions whatsoever. We will never know if Mathias truly committed one or more murders, nor can we be sure that Jacques Revel will ever come to terms with his time in England. Beckett‘s characters simply keep making stuff up until they expire, or rather till the author decides to end them. It is clear that none of the characters ever know the endings themselves, for they are the ones delivering our information and if they knew, I am sure they would tell us..

The place in which our writers set their characters is no less interesting than the characters themselves. The structure and the story (or lack of either) that supports our inhabitants is a mundane one at best. There are very few climactic scenes, although there are many pivotal ones. The most dramatic event in any of these works, the torture and murder of a young girl, is never even conceptualized within the novel. Instead, the events that are dwelled upon are commonplace and potentially unexciting. Yet the narrative flow of the novels is

106 not commonplace in the least. I would point out that there are more than a few works in our company that defy even the most simple effort to pinpoint a certain scene or occurrence in any chronological fashion. This is clearly true for works by Sarraute and Beckett; it is also observable in the works of Butor because of his penchant for layering different narrative times. I think our authors share a disdain for the novel written to provide pure entertainment. Clearly none of them are even worried about the degree of incomprehensiblity that is present in their novels.

In looking at these works as a whole section in literary time and place, I am struck by how many techniques first employed by the Modernists have been taken up and, dare I say, have been improved upon by these writers. The interior monologue employed by Woolf and others is given a striking new twist in the tropistic novels of Sarraute. Her use of multiple interior viewpoints is clearly antecedent to such works as To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Robbe-

Grillet‘s tricks with point of view also resemble Woolf‘s stylings at times. Butor‘s preoccupation with the narrative timing of his novels brings to mind Ulysses, in which Joyce portrays one day in the life of his Dublin characters, as well as the liberties Woolf takes with time in the two works mentioned above. The citywide ramblings of Butor‘s Jacques Revel in Passing Time and even Mathias‘ island treks make me think of both Bloom and Stephen, and of the ambulation of Beckett‘s

Molloy and Moran. I admit this cannot be an exhaustive comparison of

Modernism and the works of the writers we are concerned with here. I offer it

107 only to point out the close relationship of Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Butor to

Beckett‘s immediate predecessors.

With these similarities in mind I would even go so far as to state that I believe we can posit the Nouveau Roman as a direct link between the

Modernism that directly proceeded it and the Postmodernism that began to flourish soon after. As they built upon the narrative practices of the Modernists,

I feel that subsequent French writers built upon their experimentation. Directly after the Nouveau Roman there came the Nouveau Nouveau Roman, a title that can only exist in the French milieu. Can there be any doubt that there is a descending relationship here? In a rather subjective example, A Guide to French

Literature: From Early Modern to Postmodern, published in 1997, talks about the

Nouveau Roman, then about how the Nouveaux Romanciers continued to evolve. For example, Birkett and Kearns write:

…quite apart from the intrinsic value and interest of their work, the impact of the original group of new novelists in an increasingly mediatised French literary and educational environment has been significant. Their active and productive relationships with the institutions of literary criticism and the teaching of literature in higher education both in France and abroad has insured a wide circulation of their commitment to a more creative role for the reader in the practice of fiction and encouraged the fundamental reappraisal of the work of earlier novelists which has taken place since the 1950s…(228-229)

It then features writers associated with the Nouveau Nouveau Roman, although it doesn‘t use that term. Next comes the events of May 1968, and their effect on the French novel. This period takes us all the way up to 1980, and the discussion

108 of writers at this time ends with the statement: ―In a postmodern age deprived of universality, the novel may be adopting less heroic stances and more self- reflective irony‖ (238). This sentence could easily be found in one of Robbe-

Grillet‘s or Sarraute‘ essays.. And, in a spatial sense, the span from the Nouveau

Roman to postmodern in this survey of French literature is only ten pages long.

Beckett, of course, is not featured with the Nouveaux Romanciers in A

Guide to French Literature. He has not been associated with them for quite some time. In many ways Beckett‘s star flew higher and shined brighter than those of the Nouveaux Romanciers. This is partly for reasons of exposure and partly for degree of excellence. Beckett‘s divergence from the novel definitely made a much bigger noise on the world stage than did the experiments of some of the others. His Waiting for Godot revolutionized the theater as we know it, and began a critical interrogation that has not yet seen its conclusion. Coming into this project, I was just like most everyone else: I knew Beckett inside out, but had barely heard of Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Butor. I must admit that I am glad to have made the acquaintance of all three, and will strive to make them known to any and all I come across. I feel that the reading works of these writers is important to a fully developed understanding of Modernism. The value of pursuing this inquiry has been a most personal one, but I am glad that it has taken place in a forum that will be accessible to anyone interested.

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