Towards a New Novel

In this article on the Guardian's BookBlog, Andrew Gallix uses Alain Robbe-Grillet's defense of the 'New Novel' back in the 60s as a way of discussing David Shields's more recent (though nearly identical) criticism of contemporary novels as "antediluvian texts".

I remember reading an interview with David Shields in the February 2010 issue of Bookslut, in which he discussed his latest work, Reality Hunger. Reality Hunger is, by his own description, a work of appropriation art which consists of an ass-load of quotations that have been organized into "thematized rubrics, otherwise known as chapters; [each of which has] a movement, an argument." He explains that, "What drove the thing from the beginning was that I needed to explain to myself why I don’t write fiction per se anymore, and why with various few exceptions I can’t and don’t read it."

Shields goes on to disparage 'conventional novels'--that is, novels which emphasize narrative over his own much-beloved 'idea'--and issues a call for writers to think beyond the novel's traditional forms and to, in essence, "not be boring". For him, I suspect, that indictment boils down to being formally innovative, but depending on who one’s asking, ‘boring’ can mean a whole lot of different things.

Mr. Gallix too lauds the French proponents of the noveau roman for championing a novel which integrates into its form evolving ideas about human consciousness. Alain Robbe-Grillet claimed that a novel expresses nothing but itself, and that there must be no distinction between a text's content (here: its ideas) and the text itself.

So far I am in perfect agreement.

For Robbe-Grillet, his project was expressing the distance between man/author and the world around him. It was an existential problem, one he chose to address by designing a new prose style that placed the narrator, not as a god interacting with and defining his surroundings, but as a set of eyes that took them in and figured his own position in relation to those objects around him. The ‘New Novel’ is descriptive, exhaustingly so, although in that description one begins to get a sense of the narrator's place in his environment, and also of his narrative circumstance therein.

As an idea, I find this approach interesting, invigorating... despite the fact that I have never been able to get through a single one of Robbe-Grillet's 'experiments'. His contemporaries must have had similar issues with the texts’ readability, and thereby prompted Robbe-Grillet to publish a series of essays defending his project, which were later on collected into a single volume, titled Towards a New Novel. Shields too, in his interviews and public statements, seems to be similarly chaffed by audiences' inability to grasp 'what he is doing' (although this strikes me as ironic, considering his own claim that he "didn't think at all about the reader when writing this book". Robbe-Grillet too, though he believed a work and its ideas should be bound up into one thing, evidently had no problem speaking about his work in other contexts).

Reality Hunger, despite its audacious form, Shields describes as his most personal book, having taken him several years to write, and expressing thoughts which he'd been "living with" for thirty years, "and quite passionately for at least the past fifteen." That is fine. It sounds to me like writing the book represents a profound and significant act of honesty on his part, which is what, in the end, art is all about. His existential/ideological assumptions necessitated that book's appearance, as well as its specific form. Though why he should decry contemporary literature's lack of innovation, its idea-lessness, simply because it does not suit his own existential assumptions, remains to me unclear. It is great that past writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, and present ones like David Shields, are struggling with the novel's form in light of their own unique position in space. Most honest writers, in their own way, do. But to me, when I hear people tell me that "No one should be writing this way," or that realism is an outdated mode, or that some particular style fails to address man's modern condition, my response is: "Who's modern condition are you talking about?"

Really, these kinds of criticisms sound to me like bitter authors trying to justify their own unique vantage, condemning others' shallowness for not being able to see what they alone are in a position to see. Some people’s issues lead them to question textual form, others’ do not. Some little piggies like roast beef, other little piggies have none. I simply cannot take seriously the idea that readers should be faulted for continuing to find significance of 'traditional' narratives. I, for one, have yet to accept that the stories we tell ourselves are without meaning, that the experiences and characters we encounter in 'traditional’ fictions are insignificant, either to ourselves or to society. It seems to me that the novel's great characteristic is that it can be so many different things, and that to any given person it can be (and is) something entirely different. Why hound a person for writing like Chekhov, if writing like Chekhov is what interests him; if Chekhov's is the most appropriate voice for whatever is inside of him, dying find expression? That is what art is about; not 'moving the novel forward', as if it won't move forward on its own, or as if it were bound to move only in one direction. Art is about honesty, whether you're attempting to connect with others, exploring memories, playing with language, or articulating new ideas and forms, it is silly and base for one artist to tell another how she should occupy herself.