Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  For this movement, and the accumulating emotion and concern around the things described, Robbe-Grillet, in his essay “Time and Description in Fiction Today,” offers to substitute “the very movement of the description.” Here we have the second false analogy—with painting. The practitioners of literature can hardly escape the impression that painting is the century’s heroic, dominant art, the art that has won the allegiance of the rich, the art most productive of manifestos, credos, saintliness, and fresh waves of innovation. Above all, it is painting that has purified itself of content; with Cézanne, the canvas ceases to be a window and becomes a flat field whereupon a drama has occurred—the oranges or Mont Sainte-Victoire or Mme. Cézanne serving as a mere excuse. Abstraction eliminates even the excuse. Naturally, novelists seek to attain to this lordly independence of circumstance, this sacerdotal self-sufficiency. As early as 1861, Flaubert was assuring the Goncourt brothers that “The story, the plot of a novel is of no interest to me. When I write a novel I aim at rendering a color, a shade. For instance, in my Carthaginian novel, I want to do something purple.… In Madame Bovary, all I wanted to do was to render a gray color, the mouldy color of a wood louse’s existence. The story of the novel mattered so little to me that a few days before starting on it I still had in mind a very different Madame Bovary from the one I created.… she was to have been a chaste and devout old maid.” Flaubert’s claim seems wistful; he sounds like an Impressionist, and the Impressionists were still short of the final liberation, insofar as their brushwork recalls the beauty of real water lilies, sunshine, haystacks. A page of print can never, like a rectangle of paint, lift free of all reference to real objects; it cannot but be some kind of shadow. Further, a painting is from the painter’s hand, whereas a book has passed through a mechanical process that erases all the handwriting and crossing-out that would declare the author’s presence and effort. Robbe-Grillet’s off-center duplications, subtle inaccuracies, and cubistic fragmentation do not convey “the very movement of the description.” They instead seem mannered devices intended to give unsubstantial materials an interesting surface.

  Compare Kafka’s truncated chapters and warps of narrative. They rise, we feel, from within, in spite of the author’s pained sincerity and conscientious prose; they are neurotic in nature. And a neurosis is a pro-founder product of a culture than a theory. Robbe-Grillet does have instincts, tropisms toward certain styles of experience; his first novel, The Erasers, a coherent detective story, shows the same surveyor’s eye, the same fondness for duplication and stalled motion, as does his last. But between the two there has been a buildup of theory, a stylization of intuition. La Maison de Rendez-Vous is less a work of art than an objet d’art, shiny with its appliqué of progressive post-Existential thought; it has a fragile air of mere up-to-dateness, of chic.

  Whereas Miracle of the Rose, by Jean Genet, is as subjective and compulsive as one could wish. This, his second novel, was written in the prisons of La Santé and Tourelles, in 1943, on the pieces of white paper supplied to the convicts for the making of paper bags. Any hope of publication must have been desperate. His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, written in 1942, proclaims itself, and is acclaimed by Sartre in his introduction, as a jailbird’s masturbatory fantasies. Miracle of the Rose springs, as it were, from the same aesthetic: “I carried Bulkaen off in the depths of my heart. I went back to my cell, and the abandoned habit of my abandoned childhood took hold of me: the rest of the day and all night long I built an imaginary life of which Bulkaen was the center, and I always gave that life, which was begun over and over and was transformed a dozen times, a violent end: murder, hanging, or beheading.” Reality and fantasy are inextricable. Miracle of the Rose seems slightly more earthbound than Our Lady of the Flowers—a touch less brilliant and soaring, a shade more plausible and didactic. Genet’s own person emerges somewhat more solidly; while the earlier novel made the reader marvel that a criminal had become a writer, now it seems stranger that such a writer became a criminal. We are permitted glimpses—in categorical phrases like “a region to which irony has no access,” in a critical disquisition on the vulgarity of placing slang words in quotation marks—of a depraved man whose vocation, nevertheless, from boyhood on has been literary. As a thief, he stole books!—“books with heraldic bindings, the Japanese vellum of deluxe editions, the long-grained moroccan copies.”

  As in Our Lady, the story line of Miracle of the Rose, obeying no known gravitational laws, flies back and forth among the men Genet loves: Harcamone, the condemned man invisible in the death cell; Bulkaen, the young weakling covered even to his eyelids with tattoos; Villeroy, the big shot whose chicken Genet becomes at the boys’ reformatory of Mettray; Divers, Villeroy’s successor, who marries Genet in a mock ceremony and reappears fifteen years later, at the state prison of Fontevrault, and again possesses his bride. An occasional physical description or snatch of dialogue reveals the lustreless thugs beneath the extraordinary flowers of metaphor in which they are garlanded, but these pimps and crashers, big shots and chickens, exist primarily as angels and archangels in the inverted heaven of Genet’s dreaming. The prison Fontevrault was once a monastery; when Genet arrives, manacled, the doorways are lit up as if for Christmas. Christianity permeates his confinement there. He suffers a series of mystic visions centered upon Harcamone, and indeed the prison world, “the eternal gray season in which I am trapped,” does approximate the religious view of the world. Abasement gives rise to transcendent consolations: “And as our life is without external hope, it turns its desires inward. I cannot believe that the Prison is not a mystic community,” “Your pride must be able to undergo shame in order to attain glory,” “One is a saint by the force of circumstances which is the force of God! … I loved Bulkaen for his ignominy.” These testimonies, obtained under pressures of deprivation comparable to the oppression in which primitive Christianity thrived, cannot be dismissed as blasphemous any more than the pervasive erotic content can be dismissed as “homosexual.” Genet is one of the few writers to make homosexual love credible, both in concrete detail—“Our shaved heads rolled around each other, with our rough cheeks scraping”—and in inner essence, in the tenderness and hysteria it shares with all sex.

  Some months ago, the Reverend Tom Driver, writing in the Saturday Review, admired Miracle of the Rose for showing Genet’s transformation from a passive, “female” homosexual, the concubine of Villeroy, into an aggressive “male” one, the assaulter of Bulkaen. The improvement, to Driver, seemed self-evident, but three angry letters responded, one refusing to renew a subscription, another deploring “the literary morass of this decade,” and a third likening Genet to the Nazis. Indeed, Genet, whose wartime efforts consisted of weaving, while in prison, camouflage nets for the Germans, does write kindly of the occupation forces: “When it was reported that the Germans were preparing to leave, France realized, in losing the rigidity they had imposed on her, that she had loved them.” It must be admitted, especially by those of us admiring of his rhetoric, that Genet, in his submission to rigidity and his quest for the resplendence of emotional extremes, is led into a moral realm where no conventional liberal, or even civilized person, can follow. “War was beautiful in the past because in shedding blood it produced glory. It is even more beautiful now because it creates pain, violence, and despair.… I love the war that devoured my handsomest friends.… Novels are not humanitarian reports. Indeed, let us be thankful that there remains sufficient cruelty, without which beauty would not be.” He worships Harcamone, who gratuitously murders a guard at Fontevrault; at Mettray, he admires Van Roy, who betrays an escape plot and thereby has “dared make a terrible gesture” demonstrating that “the strongest big shots were squealers.” He is nostalgic for the superior—compared to mature criminals—ferocity of adolescents and remembers his own cruelty: “My cruelty, when I was sixteen, made me stab the left eye of a child who, frightened by my pitiless stare and realizing that his eye attracted me, tried to save it by putting his
fist to it.” Consistent with this savagery toward others is a fervent death wish: “My love of beauty (which desired so ardently that my life be crowned with a violent, in fact bloody death) … made me secretly choose decapitation.” Genet’s outlawry is more thorough than de Sade’s, who at least blamed God for the existence of pain; Genet says, “God is good.… He strews so many traps along our path.” Only the desert saints of early Christianity, perhaps, would so blithely have burned the world to produce visions.

  Is Miracle of the Rose an avant-garde novel? Genet does not claim it to be: “If I were writing a novel, there might be a point in describing the gestures I made, but the aim of this book is only to relate the experience of freeing myself from a state of painful torpor, from a low, shameful life taken up with prostitution and begging.” Certainly it lacks description in the sense of giving persons and objects an appearance of autonomy. The characters, apart from their names, are no more distinguishable than the mosaic figures aligned within a Byzantine dome. The dome is Genet’s skull: he is absolute Creator within this universe, not only of persons but of the laws that control their motions. The humanization of nature, which Robbe-Grillet would eliminate from fiction, here operates with a vengeance; everything is transmuted into metaphor, nothing is more than what it means to Genet. The very prison melts so that, at the book’s climax, Genet can mystically join Harcamone on his walk to the guillotine. The novel is a loose form, but Miracle of the Rose seems to me to fall outside it and to belong rather to that older stream of French literature, contributory to the novel, of essay and pensée, memoir and letter, confession and self-revelation. “We belonged to the Middle Ages,” Genet says of his fellow-convicts, and when he writes of entering through Harcamone’s gullet a country landscape detailed down to “the remains of a country fair: a spangled jersey, the ashes of a campfire, a circus whip,” his untrammelled hyperbole belongs—in defiance of intervening centuries of bourgeois empiricism and objectivity—to Rabelais.

  Robert Pinget is not as yet well known on this side of the Atlantic. The Inquisitory was originally published in 1962; from the jacket copy, and a laudatory review of some earlier novels printed among Robbe-Grillet’s essays, I gather that since his first book, a collection of stories entitled Entre Fantoine et Agapa, Pinget’s fiction has explored an imaginary provincial region between Fantoine and Agapa, a Gallic Yoknapatawpha County—an “absurd suburb of reality,” in Robbe-Grillet’s phrase. Certainly The Inquisitory, which won the Prix des Critiques, abounds with circumstantial information. Thirty pages are devoted to a description, shop by shop, of the main square of the village of Sirancy; the street geography of the town of Agapa is exhaustively examined; eleven pages call the roll of furnishings in the drawing room of a château, which is eventually inventoried from cellar to attic; and an attentive reader with pencil in hand could probably draw, from the various textual indications, a map of the entire region. Now, such feats of particularization demand more patience than passion from writer and reader alike, but the end result is the kind of trustworthiness absent, for different reasons, from both La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Miracle of the Rose. The Inquisitory is of the three by far the best novel, if by novel we understand an imitation of reality rather than a spurning of it.

  Not that Pinget is old-fashioned; he has put himself to school with Robbe-Grillet and Beckett. The novel’s premise is a Beckettian stripped situation: an infinitely garrulous old château servant is being quizzed by an infinitely curious investigator. Both are nameless. Punctuation marks are abjured. A shadowy secretary is in the room, typing up all three hundred and ninety-nine pages of meandering testimony. The object of the investigation—the disappearance of the château secretary—is never clarified. The dialogue, initially full to bursting of visual measurement and quidditas, ebbs into a fatigued exchange, laconic and baffled. All this circumstantiality protests against circumstantiality, both as an adjunct of the novel and as the illusory stuff of life: “Another twenty rooms and then there’ll still be more and you’ll tell me to describe them, and more and more kitchens servants tell-tale tittle-tattle secrets of the bedchamber families mile upon mile of streets and stairs and lumber-rooms and junk-shops of antique-dealers grocers butchers of skimping and scraping everywhere in our heads how dreary it all is always starting all over again why.” The investigator is in a sense the all too ideal reader, asking again and again, “Go on,” begging, “Describe the longest route.” And the answerer, with his omnivorous memory and solipsistic deafness—the questions put to him must be written on slips of paper—is the aboriginal storyteller, whose enterprise is essentially one of understanding:

  … we’re bound to understand in the end

  Understand what

  The rest what one’s forgotten sometimes I tell myself

  Explain

  Perhaps that’s the answer that does the least harm

  What answer

  Understanding what one’s forgotten

  What

  It seems so to me unless I’m talking nonsense.…

  Pinget’s very avant-garde novel of the absurd incorporates the full French novelistic tradition. Like Proust, he has a curé who dabbles in the etymology of place names; like Balzac, he avidly traces the fortunes of little provincial shops through all the ups and downs that gossip traces. The number of anecdotes, of miniature novels, caught in his nets of description cannot be counted; presumably some are expanded elsewhere in Pinget’s oeuvre. In this book, the curve of interest moves through the château itself (the two “gentlemen” who own it, their wealth, their homosexuality, their fussiness, their decadence, all implied by lengthy humorous descriptions of their house-furnishings), and then out into the social and geographical composition of the region as a whole (“The main resources of the district are in the soil and always will be”), and finally into the character and philosophy of the narrator himself. He has lost a wife and child; he is immensely lonely; he believes in diabolism and locates direct access to Hell in a quarry region called Vaguemort. Heaven’s counterpart appears with the revelation that in the medieval section of the château lives a third employer, Monsieur Pierre—“a few intimate friends used to call them the Holy Trinity but to be frank the only holy man is Monsieur Pierre”—who is a hermit and an astronomer. So by the novel’s end this district, into which enough historical allusion has been insinuated to render it an analogue of France, serves as a model of the world, with all human possibilities somewhere touched upon. Grove Press will, I hope, publish more of Pinget’s work, which seems not only highly accomplished but thoroughly masculine, quite without the eunuchoid air of distress with which too much modern fiction confronts its bride the world.

  All praise conceded, it remains to confess that none of these three books was hard to put down and that it is hard to imagine very many Americans, except for reviewers and students of the “art of the novel,” reading them. All partake of that resistant modern motionlessness, so different from the lightning speed of Biblical chronicle or the tidal roll of Homeric narrative or the bustling forward march of the 19th-century novel—a motionlessness present in the circular structures of Finnegans Wake and Remembrance of Things Past, in the unconquerable distances of Kafka and the unconscionable length of Bloom’s day, in the final “Let’s go” of Waiting for Godot, followed by the stage direction “(They do not move).” The avant-garde novel itself has been saying “Let’s go” for forty years, and has not outdistanced Joyce or left Kafka behind. There is an enfeebling doubt as to ends: Do stories end? Do novels have an end, a purpose? To entertain? To educate? To exasperate? To dehumanize literary idiom? To facilitate the author’s onanism? The characteristic movement of modern narrative is of prolongation, of postponement. Novels end but do not have an end.

  Yes or no answer

  I’m tired

  Thus The Inquisitory concludes. It is an honest, inconclusive conclusion. In an age of waiting (of, Christian eschatology would have it, a between-times), we find our loss of teleological sense r
eflected in books whose intricate energy, like that of barbarian designs, is essentially static.

  Infante Terrible

  THREE TRAPPED TIGERS, by G. Cabrera Infante, translated from the Spanish by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine. 487 pp. Harper & Row, 1971.

  Some things are more lost in translation than others; jokes and Racine, for instance, lose more than newspapers and de Maupassant. In its original Spanish, Tres Tristes Tigres, by G. Cabrera Infante, won the Biblioteca Breve and contended for the Formentor Prize; in French, it won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. In English, however, as Three Trapped Tigers, the novel comes over as a tedious, verbose, jejune, self-delighting mess, and unless the publisher decides to distribute good-sportsmanship awards to those few readers who persevere to the end it should generate no prizes. One can deduce that the life of Three Trapped (though “sad” is what they originally were) Tigers lay in its skin of Spanish, and that a creature so ectomorphic, so narrowly vital, was bound to perish away from the nurture of its native climate. Or one might, less kindly, conclude that the novel was derivative, that its excitement derived from the translation of the methods of Ulysses into Cuban idiom, and that, restored to Joyce’s mother tongue, it shows up as a tired copy.