Sins of Omission

In his Salon essay regretting the supposedly baneful influence Alain Robbe-Grillet exerted on both writers and readers, Stephen Marche asserts that

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He represented, through his status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire generation that turned literary experimentation into self-involved blandness. In the '50s, writers like Nabokov could produce "Pale Fire" or "Lolita" and feel themselves part of the mainstream of literary culture. After the '60s, after Robbe-Grillet, anyone who experimented in fiction was being consciously marginal, or at least countercultural. Thomas Pynchon (Nabokov's student) removed himself in the most dramatic way; Nicholson Baker is another, quieter example.

Robbe-Grillet not only convinced a generation of talented novelists that there was something vulgar about attracting a popular readership but also lost the war he undertook to fight; the reaction against him was so much stronger than the revolution. . . .

I have to assume that by "English fiction" Marche means English-language fiction, since his examples of post-Robbe-Grillet writers who continued to defy the "old-fashioned" rules of fiction writing are both American. Thus if he is contending that "English fiction" after the nouveau roman retreated into quiescence because its "literary experimentation" was too extreme (although honestly I can't really be sure just what his argument is--on the one hand it seems to be that writers have retreated into 19th century forms, while on the other it seems he is chiding writers like Pynchon and Baker for not seeking a "popular readership"), he's just plain wrong.

American fiction of the 1960s and 1970s was vibrantly experimental, in most cases (including that of Pynchon) more "adventurous" than Robbe-Grillet ever was. This is the era of Barth and Barthelme, Coover and Sorrentino, Elkin and Gass. There were even writers who shared the era's iconoclasm and managed to attract a rather wide readership--Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, for example. Granted, these writers were not much influenced by Alain Robbe-Grillet one way or the other, but it's not a very informed literary history that simply skips over these writers as if they don't count. If Marche thinks there were writers from this period who turned literary experimentation into "self-involved blandness," I wish he'd name them, although I don't see how anyone could call The Sot-Weed Factor or The Public Burning or Mulligan Stew "bland." Some readers might be put off by the sheer scale of the experimental ambition in these books, but they could hardly be criticized as "pretentious and dry."

Nor can I really accept Marche's critique of James Wood as a critic who contends "that the novel is essentially a nineteenth century form." Wood's critical benchmark is not the Victorian novels we immediately think of when fiction as "a nineteenth century form" is invoked. It is instead the distinctly modern tradition of English novels from Henry James to Henry Green, the modernists who themselves engaged in "literary experimentation" for the sake of, among other things, greater "psychological realism" in fiction. Wood thinks that too many post-WWII writers have abandoned the modernists' emphasis on explorations of "Mind" for zany exercises in "hysterical realism" and other misguided pranks. I don't agree with him--I think postmodernism is precisely an attempt to extend and expand the experiments of the modernists (if not solely through psychological realism)--but it just isn't accurate to say he wants to take us all the way back to the novel as it was known before modernism.

Marche praises writers like Junot Diaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Mitchell for "becoming more aggressive stylistically, and more popular, and more pleasurable," as if the previous generation of experimental writers was passive and sedate. Again, what writers does he have in mind? Quite frankly, Diaz, Foer, and even Mitchell seem to me quite mild and conventional compared to the agression and comic force of Barthelme, Elkin, and Coover. They're everything Marche thinks Alain Robbe-Grillet made impossible, and I'm surprised he passes over them so blithely, since his novel Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (which I reviewed here) not insignificantly exhibits something of their adventurous spirit. I have to conclude that Marche has taken his particular impatience with Alain Robbe-Grillet and generalized it into a history of mid-to-late 20th century fiction that just can't withstand scrutiny.

Comments

[King Wenclas]

Nearly all of the writers you mention were part of the long march away from the reading public; away from literature having standing and relevance in the general culture.
What's a fact: In 2008 these writers are no longer "cutting edge." They represent the failed old way of doing things.
They were embraced by the literary establishment decades ago.
New ideas, dissenting ideas, now are coming from the opposite direction. . . .

[maitresse]

What's more, I see absolutely no evidence whatsoever (in Marche's essay or in my own reading experience) that Robbe-Grillet was keeping any novelist from doing anything they wanted to do. I can think of many impediments to writing the novel one might wish to write-- talent, money, publishers, or critics come to mind-- but Robbe-Grillet??

[Chris]

You may be interested to learn, Dan, that Wood responds to Marche's charges in the comments thread of the piece.

[King Wenclas]

I hope folks don't mind if I pursue this topic a bit. I was introduced, after all, to Mr. Green and his blog in 2004, when he referred to me as "anti-intellectual."
I guess whether that was true or not depends on how you define intellectual. If it means someone who asserts intelligence he doesn't have-- who is merely playing a part or a role, like Robbe-Grillet-- then, yes, I'm against that.
Point #1: Clarity of expression is a sign of good writing. Jargon and obscurity (see postmodernism) is not.
What's good writing?
What should be our standards?
This is a key question, Green-- if not THE key question.
For forty years or more we've been force-fed by the critical establishment writing that by-and-large isn't very good.
Nabakov, for instance, is wildly overrated. His most accessible book, Lolita, is medicore and embarrassing--
as embarrassing a work from a supposed great writer as Robert Coover's tepidly written trick story "The Babysitter."
Robbe-Grillet, like Paul Auster at his worst, was a literary charlatan who knew how to pretend to be an intellectual without having to produce anything truly intelligent and worthwhile.
Many postmodernists leave out only what literature is about-- dynamic characters, setting, atmosphere, story, myth; along with the transcendence which results from actual literature. These writers-- these quacks-- will never touch the soul of the reader because their target is restricted to select segments of the conscious intellect. They use the tools necessary to achieve this end and no more.
Pynchon is the best of a bad lot, but even with him we see fakeness on nearly every page-- game playing in place of knowledge and truth. Conveying truth traditionally was the novelist's job. This has been forgotten.
(The essence of postmodernism, in fact, is playing with the falseness of the world.)
Compare Pynchon with an above-average 20th century American novelist like James Gould Cozzens and you'll see the difference. Cozzens is a difficult writer for many readers, because of his uncompromising intelligence.
In his best work, like Guard of Honor, you encounter
a.) Aesthetic form; expressed through the artwork as an entirety.
b.) Knowledge of society and the world; capturing in one book, through the novelist's intelligence, a giant social entity-- in this instance the Army Air Force in WWII.
c.) Every tool in the author's toolbox used.
The result is the sense of artistic completeness which comes from great art-- the completeness of a Beethoven symphony.
In comparison, your much-lauded postmodernists appear to be what they are: a collection of poseurs and fakirs.

[jonathan]

I don't know of any writer more clear in expression than Robbe-Grillet. Is Nabokov an unclear writer? Is Paul Auster an unclear writer? (He is derivative of other writers, but not unclear in the least.) Gilbert Sorrentino? Is "Conveying truth traditionally was the novelist's job" a clear sentence? I don't know whether that adverb goes with conveying truth or with the job! It's pretty clear that Cervantes was playing around a lot with reality and fiction, so the traditional job of the novelist is to explore the boundaries between what's real and what's not, not to convey truth. After all, fiction is a pack of lies.

Postmodern fiction is not particularly unclear in its writing. What's known as posmodern theory (more accurately, poststructuralism) is a different matter. The fact that you don't even know the difference shows you are worse than anti-intellectual. You are not even a clear-headed middle-brow reactionary. On a very basic level you don't know what you're talking about: the literal object of reference.

And you compare Cozzens to Beethoven? Maybe Louis Auchincloss is Mozart then? And James Michener gets to be Bach?

[Steven Augustine]

"(The essence of postmodernism, in fact, is playing with the falseness of the world.)"

What a self-servingly facile reading, Wenclas! You sound like a drunk in a bar deriding Picasso, c. 1940.

If you can't spot the utter "falseness" (that is, illusion-based) nature of even the most "straightforward" (see spot run) attempt at transferring the 4-dimensions of experienced existence to the zero-dimension of the written word (the two/three dimensions of physical print are just the runes encoding the reading experience and the closest writing comes to reality, in fact), how are you going to take on Pynchon, Nabokov and Coover?

You're not even clear about what writing is, man. I believe you conflate the practise with a lifestyle.

[Chris]

Which of Robbe-Grillet's writings have you read, King? What jargon do they employ?
What about "The Public Burning"? Doesn't that have aesthetic form and take on a gigantic entity?
You've read it, right?
Is Auster only a part-time charlatan?
What does transcendence feel like and can I drive on it?
Are knowledge and truth on Pynchon's other pages? Do they sometimes share a page with the fake charlatan stuff?
Doesn't "By Love Possessed" use a lot of trickery?
What tools?
Is "the sense of artistic completeness" the same as "transcendence"? It seems like transcendence might be subordinate since it only comes from actual literature rather than "great art," a much smaller category, you of all people should agree.
Which symphony?
Postmodernists are religious ascetics?

[Amateur Reader]

For those who haven't read "Guard of Honor", a trip to it's Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_of_Honor) is worthwhile.

"The whole morning had been upsetting, with too many things going on at once. Counting his own pulse, Colonel Ross could tell that his blood pressure, which troubled him occasionally, must be up, close to the point where the headache would begin."

Yep, time to toss out the Nabokov and Robbe-Grillet. I'm a Cozzens man from now on - "every tool in the author's toolbox" - the drill, the mallet, the power sander.

[Steven Augustine]

"Yep, time to toss out the Nabokov and Robbe-Grillet. I'm a Cozzens man from now on - 'every tool in the author's toolbox' - the drill, the mallet, the power sander."

And don't forget the shellac!

[Steven Augustine]

Erratum:

"If you can't spot the utter 'falseness' (that is, illusion-based nature) of even the most 'straightforward'..."

(in the interest of precision)

[jonathan]

Now I feel bad for starting the piling on. There's a reason why Cozzens is forgotten. Good writing has a certain staying power absent in writers who can't think of a concise way to say "he felt his blood pressure rise."

[Steven Augustine]

Meanwhile, in these bashings of freshly dead Robbe-Grillet and the bashings of his bashers, maybe we should separate the man's work from his manifesto, and the (love, or) hate for his manifesto from the love (or hate) of his work, appraising each fat folder on its own?

Nabokov (cited above) himself said, of R-G's "psychology-free" stance, that "(his) claims are preposterous. Those manifestoes, those dodoes, die with the dadas. His fiction is magnificently poetical and original, and the shifts of levels, the interpenetration of successive impressions and so forth belong of course to psychology... psycholgy at its best."

It's the ill-advised need to spout manifestoes (generating faux schools and aura-hijacking followers) which, perhaps, gets some stylists in trouble?

[Chris]

Manifesto or not, "For a New Novel" is still a useful book. Anyway, Robbe-Grillet expressly repudiated the characterization of his occasional reflections on literature and his own work as "manifestoes" and suggested that it's in the nature of such reflections that they sometimes involve reconsideration and contradiction. He also wrote that he didn't intend by the term "New Novel" to "designate a school, nor even a specific and constituted group of writers working in the same direction; the expression is merely a convenient label applicable to all those seeking new forms for the novel."

[King Wenclas]

So many parrots parroting the company line.
The received wisdom.
Yes, Cozzens, one of the best of all American writers, is rejected because occasionally he wrote a clunky sentence.
But we're talking about prose, aren't we?
What matters in a novel particularly is the form, the mass of characters, setting, situations: the overall effect. Yes, the resulting "transcendence," which is what real art is able to achieve, and which you'll never get in anything by Robbe-Grillet, because that wasn't his intent.
I've actually read the guy-- some years ago admittedly.
I'll endeavor to find a copy or two of his books, if you will actually sit down and read one or two of Cozzens's better novels-- The Last Adam; The Just and The Unjust; Guard of Honor-- so we have a proper frame of reference.
My point stands that for more than forty years we've seen a retreat from the world. (I would say, "real world," but of course, as you've reminded me, scientifically there is no such thing. Is there?)
The traditional novel accepts certain conventions. Well and nice and cute to reject them-- but once you've done that, what's left?
Guard of Honor presents more real intelligence about how the world operates, in reality, what most of us accept as reality. He presents a bureaucratic organization in its complexity-- a task which most novelists today will not even attempt, much less be able to accomplish.
The trend in literature has been of a piece with societal trends away from the public, toward a narrow, more personal focus. Solipsism. And so, none of you will even glance at how the literary world operates in reality. You'd have to step back, and take a broader view. Someone who does, and documents what he discovers, is casually dismissed as being "paranoid." The dismissal is the blithe refusal to think of a Know-Nothing.
Cozzens, unlike Robbe-Grillet, actually thought about more than the words on the page. He was not trapped THERE. His outlook, his view, was of America-- a subject few writers will actually cover.
The relevance, when you actually read the book, instead of a wikipedia entry about it, is striking. It's extremely relevant for what we as a nation have been going through.
Cozzens presents (and apologizes for) the intrinsic corruption and inefficiency of government-- the military in particular. He also presents honestly those who run it. He gives us the founders of Empire-- in fact, the founding moments, which we very much are living through.
The two leaders are
A.) A feckless, self-centered boy general;
B.) His wise, older handler, a colonel running the general's staff, who engages in cover-up after cover-up in order to rescue his charge.
Does this at all sound familiar?
The bottom line:
If someone a thousand years wishes to know what this American civilization was like; to understand those who created it, the mentality-- and to at the same time read a work of art which has aesthetic form, they could do no better than the Cozzens book.
I really don't know what they'd get from reading Robbe Grillet.
Perhaps you can tell me.

[the wandering jew]

If someone in 3008 wishes to know what this American civilization was like they would do well to avail themselves of what promises to be quite a bit of detritus. A novel by Cozzens or anybody else would be merely a tiny piece of the culture, not a presentation of it.
Art is not an accurate account of our times - our times are their own account. Art is a manifestation of its creator's view. Anyone is welcome to prefer Cozzens's views and forgive him his flat-footed sentences, but to claim that his view is more "real" or "authentic" than anyone else's is just snobbery. A photograph of a homeless man isn't any more "authentic" than a photograph of a millionaire - they're both portraits of aspects of the culture.
Robbe-Grillet's subject was the world, rendered into his own philosophical abstractions. His prose is suitably austere and elusive. I find his work far more transcendent than some would-be epic that attempts a supposedly-complete sociopolitical analysis.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Robbe-Grillet but his approach is no more "solipsism" than a writer, any writer, who believes he represents the entire world through his art. Wenclas is scornful of a "narrow, more personal focus," but what's more narrow than Cozzens believing that a general with high blood pressure is representative of America?

[King Wenclas]

Interesting how readily literary intellectuals retreat into their own solipsism-- then brag about the retreat.
Oh, heavens no-- no socio-political analysis! Can't have that!
Instead of "War and Peace," let's have Count Tolstoy diddling the servant girl or buggering the stable boy. After all, would this be any "less' of a story?
(Though those incidents just might be too "real world" for our desired "abstract" reality, when you think about it.)
Better if The Iliad had been about Achilles doodling in the sand. We'd then know much more about those people, their personalities and their times.
By the way, as I wait for a better explanation for why all of you love reading Mr. Robbe-Grillet, I have a quick post about him on my "Happy" blog, followed by the beginning of a further explanation as to why a reconsideration of Cozzens's standing as a novelist should be reconsidered. Take a look.
Thanks.

[King Wenclas]

p.s. Excuse my own "flat-footed" sentence! I know that with the snob boys in bow-ties I'm allowed few mistakes.
Gosh, think what Dwight MacDonald would do to me. . . .

[the wandering jew]

"War and Peace" is not a *complete* sociopolitical analysis. It is one man's view on a segment of society, and it succeeds through its language, not its ambition. That is what Tolstoy has in common with Robbe-Grillet.

[Steven Augustine]

"Better if The Iliad had been about Achilles doodling in the sand. We'd then know much more about those people, their personalities and their times."

Actually, we "learn" a hell of a lot more about eternal verities of human temperament, as exacerbated by war, from the Iliad, then we do about a wide range of details re: the place and the era in which it's set, Wenclas. And, erm, there's a pretty good chance that at least some of the chief characters (Apollo, say) didn't actually exist. Lots of cool and gory battle scenes, though.

Having said all that...

Hey, but what *is* all the literary "fighting" about, in the end? Here we are, again, merely arguing our various preferences and preaching to our various choirs.

I wouldn't mind reading a list of Wenclas' "Top 50" novels to see how many on there I (or any of the rest of us) agree on. It'd be interesting, since there *will be* overlaps in taste, to compare apples and apples, for a change.

(Top 100 might be safer)

[Steven Augustine]

(Sidebar: Mr Wandering Jew... your name wouldn't be Paul, would it?)

[the wandering jew]

Well, according to Wenclas's own entry on Cozzens:

"If "Guard" is not a great novel, then there are no great novels; there are no standards, no artistic values, and words like "great" have lost all meaning."

It seems to be the hallmark of his organization that there is no room for comparison.

(Nope, not Paul. But we Jews all know each other - I'll tell him Shalom for you!)

[Steven Augustine]

Ha ha! Actually, the fellow (an old acquaintance) I'm thinking of has a website *called* "The Wandering Jew"... hence the query

[King Wenclas]

I guess I'm old-fashioned in that I believe words have meaning. Including "great." I defined it on my blog-- largeness of scope and mind. Ambitious, yes, but the work has to achieve to a high degree that ambition. Some novelists-- Melville, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy-- obviously fit this category. Others don't.
Re The Iliad: The verities of human temperament are revealed within the context of the clash of historical forces. How could you possibly have the meaning of the encounter between Priam and Achilles without the larger conflcit happening around them? What's the meaning, without the context, of Hector's son fright at his father's helmet? It's not simple fright-- contained in that scene are the resonances which come with the child being the son of his glorious father; and the father's obligations to community which the helmet signifies.
How could Achilles's mourning of his friend have meaning without the larger drama which impelled Patroclus to take his place?
Let's start thinking, people. . . .
By the same token, I'm sorry, but War and Peace would not be the same without the larger drama of Napolean which envelopes the lives of the characters from the novel's beginning.
I've never made a list of my favorite novels.
A world list would include near the top Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace; Dumas's Vicomte de Braggelone right behind them.
American best: The Octopus ahead of Gatsby.
Incidentally, one of R-B's major fallacies as a thinker is not admitting the timeless, universal appeal of great literature. I came to literature with no preconceptions-- didn't start reading heavily, other than monster magazines and the like, until I had a job in a railyard on a nightshift, working up manifests in a tower, with several hours a night between trains to kill. I tackled whatever was on the library shelves. Robbe-Grillet, no matter how contemporary-- more of my time-- didn't touch me. The great classics did. (Everything by Jack London and O. Henry also.) Curious, isn't it?

[King Wenclas]

Back to poor Mr. Robbe-Grillet:
Having read him yesterday, I actually feel sorry for those (Mr. Green?) who tie their identities as literary intellectuals to a writer whose works and ideas are sawdust; whose novels are willful stupidities and whose book of essays on the art is not only inundated with fallacies, but is a closed system impenetrable by outside realities. It has relevance, now, mainly to itself.
Am I exaggerating?
As Robbe-Grillet would say, perhaps. Perhaps not.
*****************************
I did find several quotes in his book to agree with:
"Nothing, in art, is ever won for good. Art cannot exist without this permanent condition of being put in question."
I find it interesting also that he disclaimed the notion that the novel was reserved for specialists.
He did not favor a retreat for literature from the fullest possible audience.
Unfortunately, with his kind of literature, that's the inevitable result.

[the wandering jew]

He's more widely read than Cozzens.