Picked-Up Pieces (55 page)

By the time his verbal safari reaches “G,” Abish can make, at length and almost fluently, observations reminiscent of Moravia’s:

“I” releases the possibility of self-exposition, “M” brings with it the themes of memory and money and murder, and by “S” only an alerted eye and hypersensitive ear would notice that a quarter of the dictionary is still being abjured:

The attainment, long anticipated by the alphabet-battered reader, of “Z”s total freedom brings a disappointingly short chapter, written in the cramped, clicking tone of the others:

Each chapter, as it possesses another letter, celebrates its acquisition with a burst of alliteration, so our knowledge of systematic expansion is aurally emphasized; this subtly joyous undertone of organic growth is lost in the book’s second half, wherein the subtraction of letters echoes supposed land shrinkage (“Africa’s gradual deterioration and Africa’s decreasing area”), and some violent events on Zanzibar swallow up Queen Quat (who has painted Tanzania orange to match the maps) and squeeze the novel’s protagonists—Alex, Allen, and Alva—into a climax of betrothal. The extremely silly plot begins as a jewel robbery in Antibes and a consequent flight to Angola, Burundi, Chad, etc., and culminates in a kind of people’s uprising by the Vietcong-like army ants: “All complain close-by artillery barrage battered beautiful city, battered beautiful avenues, all because ants continue advance, continue creeping along, carving
a continent.” Though the tale is murky as well as absurd, one is tempted to concede that Mr. Abish has performed as well as anyone could, given such extravagant handicaps. “A masterpiece of its kind” does not seem too strong an accolade for a book apt to be the only one of its kind.

And there is a nice rightness to setting such a work in Africa, where incantations are still potent and national boundaries slice across tribal realities as arbitrarily as the alphabet schematizes language. Teeming yet vacant, mysterious yet monotonous, Africa permits this literary experiment.
Alphabetical Asia
would not have been so funny,
Alphabetical America
would have been cluttered with reality,
Alphabetical Antarctica
would have been blank. “Africa is a favorite topic in literature, it gives license to so much excess,” the author explains, and confesses, of his old bush jacket, that it “fed my imagination long before I ever set foot on this continent.” Mr. Abish is pictured on the dust jacket wearing this bush jacket, and a romantic black eye patch, in a studio containing African sculptures. For the Western mind, art and fancy and travellers’ accounts form Africa’s body. Though
Alphabetical Africa
gives some evidence that the author has visited the continent, it was not necessary; his Swahili dictionary and a four-color map took him where he wanted to go. Setting out with his elaborate impedimenta, he chose the mental milieu that offered him the most license and sport. Africa, explored and excavated and neocapitalized as it now is, remains—for Mr. Abish as for Moravia, as it was for Leakey and Livingstone, for Gide and Hemingway, for Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, for Burton and Speke and Mungo Park and Prince Henry the Navigator—an invitation to the imagination.

THE AVANT GARDE

L
A
M
AISON DE
R
ENDEZ
-V
OUS
, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated from the French by Richard Howard. 154 pp. Grove Press, 1966.

M
IRACLE OF THE
R
OSE
, by Jean Genet, translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman. 344 pp. Grove Press, 1966.

T
HE
I
NQUISITORY
, by Robert Pinget, translated from the French by Donald Watson. 399 pp. Grove Press, 1966.

Grove Press, that happy caterer to our prurience and our progressivism, continues to nourish the illusion of a literary avant garde by dishing up hitherto obscure modern masters (Borges, Gombrowicz), pornography with a taint of sociological or psychological interest (
My Secret Life, The Story of O
), native scatwriting (LeRoi Jones, William Burroughs), and such imported delicacies as the three French novels about to be savored. The
smörgåsbord
is mixed but not to be sniffed at. On balance, Grove Press has been the one post-war publishing house to show a personality and mission of its own, to serve the fifties and sixties as New Directions served the thirties and forties. Its courage has preceded its commercialism; it pioneered in the territory it now so cheerfully exploits with its black-mass version of the Book-of-the-Month Club, its roguish get-with-the-sexual-revolution ads, its stable of Ph.D.s willing to preface the latest “curious” memoir or “underground” classic with admonitory sermons on the righteousness of fornication. And if Grove Press’s
best American author remains Eric Berne, its Art Nouveau jackets have enfolded many foreign titles for whose translation the conscientious reader should be grateful.

It is surprising, for instance, that no more orthodox publisher undertook to make the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet available in this country. Robbe-Grillet is the leading theoretician of the
nouveau roman;
he coined the phrase and composed the first example—
The Erasers
(1953). If American writers, and loud worriers like Susan Sontag (“The novel is probably the most rear-guard art form today.… Most critically respectable novels … are, I think, essentially journalistic in conception.… [American novelists] are not essentially concerned with the novel as a work of art in the sense that most other art forms are today …”), imagine that progress is being made elsewhere, Robbe-Grillet’s astute propagandizing is a prime cause. The tired cry “Make it new” has become new in his essays, and before the consideration of his fifth and most recent novel, his program should be summarized. The first major manifesto, “A Fresh Start for Fiction” (1956), announced:

A later essay, “Nature, Humanism, Tragedy” (1958), develops these ideas into a stylistic purge. Metaphor is the villain, weaving a complicity between humanity and the alien world of “things”; metaphor—a concept including all adjectives with moral or anthropocentric coloring—implies a general myth of
depth
, humanizing nature, cheating it of its essential otherness. The categories of the “tragic” and the “absurd” are oblique maneuvers of this persistent humanism, this “bridge of souls thrown between man and things.” The task, then, is to “scour” descriptive prose of any “analogical vocabulary” and to restore “things” to “themselves,” cleansed of any hint of profundity or preëstablished order. In this scouring, the sense of sight occupies a privileged position, as the sense that measures distances—“our best weapon, especially if it keeps exclusively to outlines.” And in a still later essay, “Time and Description in Fiction Today” (1963), Robbe-Grillet adds to the priority of visual precision “the breaks of cutting, the repetitions of scene, the contradictions, the characters suddenly paralyzed as in amateur photographs” that in fact do distinguish his later novels and his films alike. The purpose of these devices is to “afford this perpetual present [of the cinema, of the
nouveau roman
] all its force, all its violence.” Temporal and spatial discontinuity, a present that never accumulates, are employed to dissolve “the trap of the anecdote.” The thereness of things emerges from their dissolution.

Robbe-Grillet’s theories constitute the most ambitious aesthetic program since Surrealism. My summary necessarily has skimped much: his reasoning is close; his remarks upon other writers, including the classics of the bourgeois novel, are reverent and lively. Because of his training as an agronomist, his understanding of science and of how its truths subvert our workaday assumptions exceeds that of most writers. His pronouncements do catch at something—a texture, an austerity—already present in other, often older French novelists, such as Nathalie Sarraute. To an American, however, there is a hollow ring of Thomism. Robbe-Grillet’s concept of thereness looks like the medieval
quidditas;
the attempt to treat existence itself as a quality that can be artistically emphasized seems a formal confusion, a scholastic bottling of the wind. Robbe-Grillet’s key concept—of “purely external and superficial” things—takes no account of the vast area of mobile and animate phenomena that mediate between
Homo sapiens
and inert matter, or of the difference between raw material and artifacts already imbued with human intention, or of the fact that to
one man another is as much a “thing” as a chair or waterfall. In making his cleavage between “humanity” and “things,” is he not guilty of a kind of humanism, elevating men into a glorious concept—Man? The real split, surely, is between the single ego and the external world—which would take us back into psychology, where Robbe-Grillet does not want to go. There is a forced naïveté in his vision, and a strange inversion of the pathetic fallacy he detests, for in artistic practice his concern with the inviolable otherness of things charges them, saturates them, with a menace and hostility as distortive of their null inner being as an imagined sympathy. One’s reservations about Robbe-Grillet’s formulations come down to the discrepancy between his description of what happens in his fiction and what actually happens. Far from striking us with their unsullied thereness, the “things” in his novels are implicated in the pervasive flimsiness and inconsequence.

La Maison de Rendez-Vous
could have been translated as
The House of Assignation
or
The Blue Villa
or even
Up at Lady Ava’s
. It tells of, or circles around, a night at the elegant brothel run by Lady Ava, or Eva, or Eve, in Hong Kong. There is a police raid, and an American, or Englishman, named Ralph or Sir Ralph Johnson or Jonestone, in love with a prostitute called Lauren, and the murder of a man called Edouard Manneret and of another named Georges Marchat or Marchant or Marchand, and several ferry rides to Kowloon, and a fluctuating penumbra of dope smuggling and white slavery and Cold War intrigue. Above it all is an “old mad king” pounding an iron-tipped cane on the floor and insomniacally rocking in a rocking chair; his name is given as King Boris, but he strongly resembles Manneret. The other presiding presence is a narrator who confesses to being constantly beset by images of female flesh and who sometimes inhabits Johnson’s body or partakes of his adventures. Through this fog of events, or anti-events (“What does all that matter? What does it matter?” the book asks itself, answering, “All this comes to the same thing”), rotates a constellation of repeated and refracted images—a broken champagne glass, an envelope containing sand or heroin or documents, a scrap of paper illustrating the evils of drugs or else pushing them, a ubiquitous rickshaw driver, the slit hobble skirt of several interchangeable Eurasian beauties who are also mannequins in shop-windows. True to Robbe-Grillet’s credo, the present never accumulates; rather, it unravels. There is a studied false numerical precision. A hand is “about eight or twelve” inches from a serving tray; forty pages
later, the distance is given as six inches. Manneret’s apartment is on the third floor, or the fifth, or the sixth, or the eighth. Different characters relive the same adventures; a play within the action becomes the action; and twin servant girls have the same name, “pronounced quite similarly, the difference imperceptible except to a Chinese ear.” The ingenuity behind all this doubling and shuffling is considerable. The writing is clean and deft and even entertaining, though the reader’s interest tends to cling, pathetically, to the excitements of the hackneyed tale of exotic intrigue that is being parodied, fragmented, and systematically frustrated. The popular adventure form underlying the sophisticated
nouveau roman
rises up and revenges itself by imposing upon the book a cliché ending of double-cross and a flat last sentence: “And there is nothing in her eyes.” But there has never been anything in her eyes. Upon the basis, I think, of false analogies, Robbe-Grillet has already dissolved, with his “descriptions whose movement destroys all confidence in the things described,” the credibility as elemental to the art of narrative as the solidity of stone or metal is to sculpture.