The work thus proposes itself as an open structure that reproduces the very ambiguity of our beingintheworld, as it is described by science, philosophy, psychology, sociology—just as our relationship with the automobile is a dialectic tension between possession and alienation, a knot of complementary possibilities.
Of course, RobbeGrillet is only one instance of a much larger problem, an instance which, however, extreme as it is, should help us understand why the authors of the nouveau roman were so often on Sartre’s side in their endorsement of political manifestos. This baffled Sartre, who could not understand how writers who seemed to keep such a distance from political issues in their narrative could be so eager to be personally involved in them.
But, as a matter of fact, all these writers (some more, some less) felt that the only way they could deal with their world in their work was by «playing» with narrative structures, since all the problems which, at the level of individual psychology and of biography, could be considered problems of conscience, in literature could be reflected only in the way the work was structured. Hence, as they refused to speak of a political project in their art, they implied it in the way they looked at the world, and turned this way of looking at the world into their project. This decision may at first appear inhuman, but on second thought it may well be the only form our humanism can assume.
In Signs, Maurice MerleauPonty defines humanism as follows:
«If there is a humanism today, it rids itself of the illusion Valery described so well when he spoke of ‘that little man within man whom we always presuppose’ . . . The ‘little man within man’ is only the phantom of our successful expressive operations; and the admirable man is not this phantom but the man who—installed in his fragile body, in a language that has already done so much speaking, and in an unstable history—gathers himself together and begins to see, to understand, and to signify.
There is no longer anything decorous or decorative about today’s humanism. It no longer loves man in opposition to his body, mind in opposition to its language, values in opposition to facts. It no longer speaks of man and mind except in a sober way, with modesty: mind and man never are; they show through in the movement by which the body becomes gesture, language an oeuvre, and coexistence truth.»»
Installed in a language that has already done so much speaking: this is the problem. The artist realizes that language, having already done too much speaking, has become alienated to the situation it was meant to express. He realizes that, if he accepts this language, he will also alienate himself to the situation. So he tries to dislocate this language from within, in order to be able to escape from the situation and judge it from without.
Since language can be dislocated only according to a dialectic that is already part of its inner evolution, the language that will result from such a dislocation will still, somehow, reflect the historical situation that was itself produced by the crisis of the one that had preceded it. I violate language because I refuse to express, through it, a false integrity that is no longer ours, but, by doing so, I can’t but express and accept the very dissociation that has arisen out of the crisis of integrity and that I meant to dominate with my discourse. There is no alternative to this dialectic. As already mentioned, all the artist can hope to do is cast some light on alienation by objectifying it in a form that reproduces it.
This is the situation sketched by Edoardo Sanguineti in his essay Poesia informale (Informal poetry): true, there is a poetry that sounds like the poetry of a nervous breakdown, but this breakdown is, above all, historical. To denounce it, it is necessary to assume its compromised language so that we can place it in front of our eyes and become aware of it; it is necessary to exacerbate the contradictions of the contemporary avantgarde, since the way to freedom can be found only from within a culture; it is necessary to suffer a massive dose of the very crisis we want to solve; in short, it is necessary to go through the entire Pains Putredinis, since «to be innocent is no longer possible,» and «in any case, for us, form can come only out of the formless, out of the formless horizon which, whether we like it or not, is our lot.»‘»
This stance is obviously quite risky. The last citation recalls the attitude of certain gnostics (Carpocrates, for instance) who believed that, to get rid of the influence of angels, lords of the cosmos, it was necessary to undergo the experience of evil, and delve into baseness to emerge from it totally purified. The historical consequence of such a persuasion took the form of the Templars’ secret rites and the liturgical perversions of an underground church whose major saint was Gilles de Rais.
And, indeed, for every artist who tries to grasp his reality by assuming the language of its crisis there is a mannerist who borrows the technique without understanding its purpose and thus turns the work of the avantgarde into sheer mannerism, a selfcomplacent exercise, just another way of alienating oneself to the existing situation by turning the anxiety of revolt and the bitterness of criticism into a formal exercise that takes place exclusively at the level of structure.
On the other hand, if it is possible to assert that the only way in which one can speak of a situation is by delving into it and by assuming its means of expression, it is impossible to define the limits of the process, or the standard of comparison that would allow us to determine whether the artist has really been able to turn his experience into some sort of revelation or whether, in fact, it has been for him only a pleasant, passive vacation. But this is the task of a critical discourse that analyzes one work at a time and not of a philosophical investigation concerned with a certain attitude of contemporary poetics.
We can, at most, propose an aesthetic hypothesis: whenever this process of awareness produces an organic work that expresses itself in all its structural connections, we can assume that this is also evidence of the degree of awareness of both its author and its audience. The form of such a work cannot but refer to the cultural reality it represents—refer to it in the most complete and organic way possible. Every successful form rests on the conscious translation of amorphous matter into a human di mension. In order to dominate matter, the artist must first understand it; if he has understood it, he cannot be its prisoner, no matter how severely he has judged it.
And even if he has accepted it wholeheartedly, he has accepted it only after seeing its wealth of implications and after discerning, without disgust, the tendencies that may seem negative to us. This is the situation that Marx and Engels saw as perfectly realized in Balzac, whom they considered as both a reactionary and a legitimist.
According to them, Balzac was able to sketch and organize the rich substance of the world he chose to narrate with such a visionary depth that his work (that is, the work of a writer totally disinterested in certain issues, and basically in agreement with his world—unlike the work of Eugene Sue, who in the name of progress tried to express a political judgment on the situation in which he lived) is essential for an understanding and evaluation of bourgeois society. In other words, Balzac accepted the situation in which he lived, but he was also able to express it so lucidly in all its connections, that he did not remain its prisoner, or, at least, not in his work.
Balzac conducted his analysis at the level of plot, in the way he presented his subject matter (whose aim was to illustrate the content of his investigation). Contemporary literature no longer analyzes the world in this fashion; rather, it exposes it by means of a structural articulation—so that this articulation is itself the subject, and thereby the content, of the work.
This is how literature—like music, painting, cinema—expresses the discomfort of a certain human situation. On the other hand, we cannot reasonably expect that contemporary society be its only concern. Literature can also realize, in its structures, the image of the cosmos that is promoted by science, the last frontier of a metaphysical anxiety which, being unable to give unitary form to the world on a conceptual level, cries to elaborate its replacement on an aesthetic level, in an aesthetic form. Finnegans Wake may well be an example of such a literary direction.
Some people believe that a concern with cosmic relationships is an expression of indifference toward mankind and a way of avoiding more human issues. But this is nonsense. A literature that tries to express, in its openness and indeterminacy, the vertiginous and hypothetical universes perceived by the scientific imagination is still concerned with mankind, since it tries to define a universe that has assumed its present configuration thanks to a human process; by «process» I mean the application of a descriptive model to an objective reality.
Here again, literature would express our relationship to the object of our knowledge, and our concern with the form we have given the world, or the form we have failed to give it, and would try to
