In fact, he has learned so much and learned it so well, that he has begun to doubt whether the novelist's artificially constructed object is capable of secreting the wealth of the real object. And since writers of the objective school insist that it is useless to attempt to reproduce the infinite complexity of life, and that it is up to the reader to draw on his own resources, using the instruments of investigation he already possesses to wrest its mystery from the impenetrable object they present to him, he prefers to confine his efforts to certainties, and goes in for facts.
The 'true fact' has indeed an indubitable advantage over the invented tale. To begin with, that of being true. This is the source of its strength of conviction and forcefulness, of its noble indifference to ridicule and bad taste, as also of a certain quiet daring, a certain off-handedness that allow it to break through the confining limitations in which a regard for likelihood imprisons the boldest of novelists, and to extend far afield the frontiers of reality. It allows us to attain to unknown regions into which no writer would have dared venture and brings us, with one leap, to the edge of the 'abyss.'
Where is the invented story that could compete with that of Gide's Séquestrée de Poitiers, or with those of the Concentration Camps, or the Battle of Stalingrad? And how many novels, how many characters, situations and plots would be needed to furnish the reader with a subject matter equal in richness and subtlety to that offered for our curiosity and reflection by almost any well- constructed monograph?
It is, therefore, for very wholesome reasons that today's reader prefers accounts of actual experiences (or at least having the reassuring appearance of such) to the novel. Nor, as might be supposed, does the recent vogue of what, in France, is referred to as the 'American' novel give the lie to this preference. On the contrary, it confirms it. This particular literature which, for the very reasons just mentioned, is looked down upon by many cultivated American readers, by transporting the French reader into a foreign universe in which he had no foothold, lulled his wariness, aroused in him the kind of credulous curiosity that travel books inspire, and gave him a delightful impression of escape into an unknown world. Now that he has more or less assimilated these exotic foods—which, despite their richness and variety, turned out to be much less tonic than had been supposed—the French reader, as well, is no longer interested.
It goes without saying that all these attitudes with regard to the novel are all the more familiar to the author who, being himself a reader, and often a very perceptive one, has also experienced them.
The result is that when he starts to tell a story and says to himself that he must make up his mind to write down for the mocking eyes of the reader, 'The Marquise went out at five o'clock,' he hesitates, he hasn't the heart, he simply can't bring himself to do it.
And if, after taking his courage in hand, he decides not to give the Marquise the considerate attention demanded by tradition, but to write only of what interests him today, he realises that the impersonal tone, which is so well adapted to the needs of the old- style novel, is not suitable for conveying the complex, tenuous states that he is attempting to portray; the fact being, that these states resemble certain phenomena of modern physics which are so delicate and minute that even a ray of light falling on them disturbs and deforms them. Consequently, whenever the novelist seeks to describe them without revealing his own presence, he seems to hear the reader, like a child whose mother is reading him his first story, stop and ask: 'Who said that?'
A story told in the first person satisfies the legitimate scruples of the author. In addition, it has the appearance, at least, of real experience and authenticity, which impresses the reader and dispels his mistrust.
For nobody today is entirely misled by the convenient procedure that consists, for the novelist, in parsimoniously apportioning bits of himself, which he invests with a certain likelihood by dividing them, necessarily somewhat at random (if they have been taken from a cross-section performed at a certain depth, they are identical with everyone) among his characters. By a process of decortication, the reader then removes these bits and places them, as in a game of lotto, in corresponding compartments he has discovered in himself.
Today, everybody is well aware, without being told, that 'la Bovary c'est moi.'{7} And since the important thing now, rather than to extend indefinitely the list of literary types, is to show the co-existence of contradictory emotions and to reproduce as closely as possible the wealth and complexity of the world of the psyche, the writer, in all honesty, writes about himself.
But that's not all. However strange it may seem, this same writer, who is awed by the reader's growing perspicacity and wariness, is, himself, becoming more and more wary of the reader.
For even the most experienced reader, if left to his own devices, tends to create types; he simply can't resist it.
He does it, in fact—in the same way as the novelist, once he has begun to relax—without even noticing that he is doing it, for the convenience of everyday life and as a result of long practice. Like Pavlov's dog, in whom the tinkle of a bell stimulates the secretion of saliva, he creates characters at the slightest possible suggestion. As in the game of 'statues,' each one he touches turns to stone. They merely serve to swell in his memory the vast collection of inanimate figures to which, day in, day out, he is constantly adding and which, since he first learned to read, has been regularly growing as a result of the countless novels he has absorbed.
But, as has already been demonstrated, the character as conceived of in the old-style novel (along with the entire old-style mechanism that was used to make him stand out) does not succeed in containing the psychological reality of today. Instead of revealing it—as used to be the case—he makes it disappear.
So that, as a result of an evolution similar to that in painting— albeit far less bold, less rapid, and interrupted by long pauses and retreats—the psychological element, like the pictorial element, is beginning to free itself imperceptibly from the object of which it was an integral part. It is tending to become self-sufficient and, in so far as possible, to do without exterior support. The novelist's entire experimental effort is concentrated on this one point, as is also the reader's entire effort of attention.
The reader, therefore, must be kept from trying to do two things at one time. And since what the characters gain in the way of facile vitality and plausibility is balanced by a loss of fundamental truth in the psychological states for which they serve as props, he must be kept from allowing his attention to wander, or to be absorbed by the characters. For this, he must be deprived as much as possible of all indications which, in spite of himself, and as a result of a natural leaning, he seizes upon in order to create illusions.
This is why the character today is reduced to a shadow of his former self. Only reluctantly does the novelist endow him with attributes that could make him too easily distinguishable: his physical aspect, gestures, actions, sensations, everyday emotions, studied and understood for so long, which contribute to giving him, at the cost of so little effort, an appearance of life, and present such a convenient hold for the reader.{8} Even a name, which is an absolutely necessary feature of his accoutrement, is a source of embarrassment to the novelist. Gide avoids use of the patronymic for his characters, for the reason that it risks situating them at once in a world too similar to that of the reader, and his preference is given to unusual Christian names. Kafka's hero has for his entire name an initial only (that of Kafka himself); Joyce designates by the initials, H.C.E., of multiple interpretations, the protean hero of Finnegans Wake. And it would be most unfair to Faulkner's bold and very worthwhile experiments, which are so revealing of the problem of the present-day novelist, if we were to attribute to a perverse and childish desire to mystify the reader, the method used by him in The Sound and the Fury which consists in giving the same Christian name to two different characters.{9} This Christian name, which he shunts back and forth from one character to the other, under the annoyed eye of the reader, li
ke a lump of sugar under the nose of a dog, forces the reader to be constantly on the alert. Instead of letting himself be guided by the sign-posts with which everyday custom flatters his laziness and haste, in order to identify the characters, he is obliged to recognise them at once, like the author himself, from the inside, and thanks to indications that are only revealed to him if, having renounced his love of comfort, he is willing to plunge into them as deeply as the author, whose vision he makes his own.
Indeed, the whole problem is here: to dispossess the reader and entice him, at all costs, into the author's territory. To achieve this, the device that consists in referring to the leading character as 'I' constitutes a means that is both efficacious and simple and, doubtless for this reason, is frequently employed.
Suddenly the reader is on the inside, exactly where the author is, at a depth where nothing remains of the convenient landmarks with which he constructs the characters. He is immersed and held under the surface until the end, in a substance as anonymous as blood, a magma without name or contours. If he succeeds in finding his way, it is thanks to stakes that the author has planted for purposes of his own orientation. No reminiscences of the reader's world, no conventional concern for cohesion or likelihood, distract his attention or curb his effort. Like the author, the only barriers he encounters are those that are either inherent in all experiment of this kind, or are peculiar to the author's vision.
As for the secondary characters, they are deprived of all autonomous existence and reduced to mere excrescences, quiddities, experiments or dreams of the 'I', with whom the author identifies himself. At the same time, this 'I', not being the novelist, need not be concerned with creating a universe in which the reader will feel too much at home, nor with giving the characters the proportions and dimensions required to confer upon them their rather dangerous 'resemblance.' His obsessed, maniacal or visionary eye may seize upon them at will, abandon them, stretch them in a single direction, compress, enlarge, flatten or reduce them to dust, to force them to yield the new reality he is striving to find.
In the same way, the modern painter—and in this connection, it might be said that, since Impressionism, all pictures have been painted in the first person—wrests the object from the universe of the spectator and deforms it in order to isolate its pictorial content.
Thus, in a movement analagous to that of painting, the novel, which only a stubborn adherence to obsolete techniques places in the position of a minor art, pursues with means that are uniquely its own, a path which can only be its own; it leaves to the other arts—and, in particular, to the cinema—everything that does not actually belong to it. In the same way that photography occupies and fructifies the fields abandoned by painting, the cinema garners and perfects what is left it by the novel.
The reader, instead of demanding of the novel what every good novel has more than often refused him, i.e. light entertainment, can satisfy at the cinema, without effort and without needless loss of time, his taste for 'live' characters and stories.
However, the cinema too would appear to be threatened. It, too, is infected by the 'suspicion' from which the novel suffers. Otherwise, how may we explain the uneasiness which, after that of the novelist, is now being evidenced by certain 'advanced' directors who, because they feel obliged to make films in the first person, have introduced the eye of a witness and the voice of a narrator?
As for the novel, before it has even exhausted all the advantages offered by the story told in the first person, or reached the end of the blind alley into which all techniques necessarily lead, it has grown impatient and, in order to emerge from its present difficulties, is looking about for other ways out.
Suspicion, which is by way of destroying the character and the entire outmoded mechanism that guaranteed its force, is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium. It forces the novelist to fulfil what Arnold Toynbee, recalling Flaubert's teaching, has called 'his deepest obligation: that of discovering what is new,' and keeps him from committing 'his most serious crime: that of repeating the discoveries of his predecessors.'
Temps Modernes February 1950.
CONVERSATION AND SUB-CONVERSATION
WHO today would dream of taking seriously, or even reading, the articles that Virginia Woolf wrote shortly after the First World War on the art of the novel? Their naïve confidence, their innocence of another age, would only elicit a smile. 'It is difficult,' she wrote with enviable candour, 'not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old.' . . . The tools used by classical writers were 'simple,' their materials were 'primitive,' and their masterpieces, in her opinion, had 'an air of simplicity.' 'But compare their opportunities with ours!' she said. And added proudly that, 'for the moderns,' the point of interest would 'very likely lie in the dark places of psychology.'
No doubt she had much to excuse her: Ulysses had just appeared. In a Budding Grove was about to receive the Goncourt Prize. She herself was working on Mrs. Dalloway. Quite obviously, she lacked perspective.
But for most people, the works of Joyce and Proust already rise up in the distance like witnesses of a past epoch, and the day will soon come when no one will visit these historical monuments otherwise than with a guide, along with groups of school children, in respectful silence and somewhat dreary admiration. For several years now interest in 'the dark places of psychology' has waned. This twilight zone in which, hardly thirty years ago, we thought we saw the gleam of real treasures, has yielded us very little, and we are obliged to acknowledge that, when all is said and done, this exploration, however bold and well carried out it may have been, however extensive and with whatever elaborate means, has ended in disappointment. The most impatient and most daring among the novelists were not long in declaring that the game was not worth the candle and that they preferred to turn their efforts in another direction. The word 'psychology' is one that no present- day writer can hear spoken with regard to himself without casting his eyes to the ground and blushing. It has something slightly ridiculous, antiquated, cerebral, limited, not to say, pretentiously silly about it. Intelligent people, all progressive minds, to whom an imprudent writer would dare admit his secret hankering for the 'dark places of psychology'—but who would dare to do so?— would undoubtedly reply with pitying surprise: 'Indeed! so you still believe in all that? ...' Since the appearance of the 'American novel' and the profound, blinding truths with which the literature of the absurd has continued to swamp us, there are not many left who believe in it. All Joyce obtained from those dark depths was an uninterrupted flow of words. As for Proust, however doggedly he may have separated into minute fragments the intangible matter that he brought up from the subsoil of his characters, in the hope of extracting from it some indefinable, anonymous substance which would enter into the composition of all humanity, the reader has hardly closed the book before, through an irresistible movement of attraction, all these particles begin to cling to one another and amalgamate into a coherent whole with clear outlines, in which the practised eye of the reader immediately recognises a rich man of the world in love with a kept woman, a prominent, awkward, gullible doctor, a parvenue bourgeoise or a snobbish 'great lady,' all of whom will soon take their places in the vast collection of fictitious characters that people his imaginary museum.
What enormous pains to achieve results that, without contortions and without hairsplitting, are obtained, shall we say, by Hemingway. And this being the case, if he handles them with equal felicity, why object to the fact that he uses the same tools that served Tolstoy in such good stead?
But there's no question of Tolstoy! Today, eighteenth and even seventeenth century writers are constantly being held up to us as models. And should some die-hard, at the risk of his life, continue to want to explore gropingly the 'darker sides,' he is immediately referred back to The Princess of Cleve and Adolph. He should read the classics a bit! Would he for a moment claim to penetrate farther than
they did into the depths of the soul, or with such ease and grace, with so keen, so light a touch?
Indeed, as soon as a writer renounces the legacy of those whom, thirty years ago, Virginia Woolf called 'moderns' and, disdaining the liberties (the 'facilities,' he would say) that they conquered, succeeds in capturing a few soul reactions couched in the pure, simple, elegant lines that characterise the classical style, he is praised to the skies. With what alacrity, what generosity, people exert themselves to discover an abundance of inexpressible sentiments beneath his reticence and silence, to see reserve and contained strength in the prudence and abstinence that are forced upon him by constant concern for maintaining the 'figure' of his style.
However, the unfortunate die-hard who, being unconcerned by the indifference and reproval awaiting him, persists nevertheless in digging in these dark regions, in the hope of extracting from them a few particles of some unknown substance, does not, for all that, enjoy the peace of mind that his independence and disinterestedness should ensure him.
Frequently doubts and scruples slacken his endeavours. For where is he to find and be able to examine these secret recesses that attract him, if not in himself, or in the persons in his immediate circle whom he feels he knows well and whom he imagines he resembles? And the tiny, evanescent movements they conceal blossom out preferably in immobility and withdrawal. The din of actions accomplished in broad daylight either drowns or checks them.
But he is well aware, as he observes himself and his fellow- creatures from his inner sanctum, steeping in the protective liquor of his tightly-sealed little jar, that, on the outside, very important things (perhaps—and he tells himself this with anguish—the only really important things) are happening: men who are probably very different from him, as well as from his family and friends, men who have other fish to fry than to hover solicitously over their innermost quakings, and in whom, moreover, it would seem that deep suffering, deep, simple joys, powerful, very evident needs, must quell these very subtle tremors, men towards whom he feels drawn, whom, often, he admires, are acting and struggling; and he knows that, to be at peace with his conscience and meet the requirements of his time, it is with them and not with himself or those like him that he should be concerned.
The Age of Suspicion Page 4