Robbe-Grillet & Sollers
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXXVII. Foucault - part 17
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth
Robbe-Grillet.
p126
...Foucault established new links with the Parisian literary world. In 1962, he joined the editorial board of Bataille's old journal, Critiques; he became friendly with the editors of a new literary quarterly called Tel quel [“as is”]; and he published a dazzling sequence of essays on some of his favorite writers: Bataille, Blanchot, Holderlin, Roussel, the scholastic pornographer Pierre Klossowski, and, last but not least, the leading apostle of the “new novel,” Alain Robbe-Grillet -- one of the touchstones of Foucault's thinking in these years.
"Man, a stranger to the world, is a stranger to himself,” Robbe-Grillet once explained, in words that ring true for Foucault as well. “Literature is not for entertainment. It is a quest,” an imaginative odyssey of self-invention and self-discovery.
I assume he means the creation of literature, not the consumption of literature. While there may be an element of "self-discovery" in reading, self-invention would seem to be limited to writing, and there can be more self-discovery there, as well.
Inspired by the stark language of Beckett, the actionless récits of Blanchot and the later philosophy of Heidegger, Robbe-Grillet had launched his own creative quest in the early 1950s. In The Erasers (1953) [and 3 more titles] ... he had refined a blank new style of writing -- the “new novel,” he called it. In his screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad (1961), he brought a similar vision to international film audiences. And in a series of polemical essays, he explained and defended his techniques.
As much as any Frenchman of his generation, it is Robbe-Grillet who deserves the credit, or blame, for delegitimating humanism and the old “myths” of subjectivity and psychological depth. In an essay published in 1957, he argued that the modern world had fallen under the sway of bureaucracy and “administrative number,” and that the novelist, if he would grapple with his times, had better jettison a number of obsolete ideas: for example, that the character of any one person made a difference; that telling stories about such characters was a useful and edifying enterprise; that one's own political and moral attitude mattered in the way that Sartre, for one, supposed. A “genuine writer,” in Robbe-Grillet's view, might well have “nothing to say.” No matter. He could still say whatever he had to say as well as he could say it, in a voice that was unmistakably his own, by elaborating a “way of speaking, starting from nothing, from the dust...."
p127
Practicing what he preached, Robbe-Grillet composed his novels in a singular style of studied apathy, flouting the consolations of narrative drama and ignoring naturalistic conventions of psychological portraiture, developing instead an uninflected voice that seemed empty of all subjective reference, even though the people he wrote about were, just as he had said, “always engaged... in an emotional adventure of the most obsessive kind, to the point of often distorting... vision and of producing imaginings close to delirium."
To a certain extent, Robbe-Grillet did empty his novels of “interiority,” just as his early admirers supposed. But impersonal though his writing seemed, all of it, as he confessed years later, had in fact grown out of the torment and turmoil of his own “emotional adventure": “I have never spoken of anything but myself. From within, and so it has hardly been noticed.” As he explained in his memoir Ghosts in the Mirror (1984), his parents, virulent anti-Semites, had avidly collaborated with the Nazis after 1940. A teenager when Germany conquered France, Robbe-Grillet was haunted, like Foucault in the same years, by a dream of apocalypse. From the early 1940s on, as Robbe-Grillet later recalled, he was obsessed by the fantasy of being “sucked reluctantly into the heart of an unknown, unstable, irrational liquid universe ready to engulf me, its ineffable face at once the face of death and of desire.” The revelation of the concentration camps left Robbe-Grillet stunned. The fascist demand for order, personified by his parents, had led to genocide; his own fantasies of death, he could now see, represented still another kind of “fatal temptation.” Looking for some way to grapple with these demons, “I was quite naturally drawn to problematic experimentation with fiction and its contradictions (I stress once more that this is how I see my adventure today) as the most promising arena in which to act out this permanent imbalance: the fight to the death between order and freedom, the insoluble conflict between rational classification and subversion, otherwise known as disorder."
p128
"Writing novels to exorcise the ghosts I couldn't come to terms with,” Robbe-Grillet approached each book as a “battlefield and stake. Instead of advancing like some blind justice obeying a divine law,” he wrote in 1984, a text should “on the contrary expose publicly and stage accurately the multiple impossibilities with which it is contending.... Hence the complicated sequences, digressions, cuts and repetitions, aporias, blind alleys, shifts in perspective, various permutations, dislocations, or inversions.” Evoking the human being as an “empty center,” the writer could draw up meticulous inventories of the objects that flashed before the eyes of his fevered protagonists. “Measuring, locating, limiting, defining,” his narrators approached the world like detectives trying to solve a murder case. The universe he conjured up in this fashion was one of the most sinister sort of factuality -- icy, unyielding, disquieting.
It was a style that Foucault loved: “The importance of Robbe-Grillet,” he declared in 1963, “can be measured by the question his work poses to every work that is contemporary with it.” This “question.” Foucault thought, involved nothing less than the inner structure and expressive “possibilities of language.” In “the sovereign and obsessive language” of Robbe-Grillet, he concluded, “more than one” -- and he surely included himself -- “has found his labyrinth.”
I'm now thinking that Foucault's "sovereignty" is very similar to "agency."
Sollers.
...In 1960, Tel quel was launched, buoyed by the promise of the “new novel.” Its editor was Philippe Sollers, an aspiring writer and dedicated libertine, still in his early twenties; its resident theoretician was Roland Barthes, the critic and essayist, who had also been one of Robbe-Grillet’s staunchest advocates in the 1950s. Like Robbe-Grillet, the critics and writers affiliated with Tel quel wished, in Barthes’s phrase, “to achieve a Dasein of literary language, a sort of blankness of writing (but not an innocence).” Like Bataille, another one of their heroes, they were fascinated by eroticism and “limit-experience” as sources of creative energy. And like Nietzsche, they embraced the enigmatic idea of “eternal recurrence,” taking the journal’s name and epigraph from one of his aphorisms: “I want the world and want it AS IS {tel quel}, want it again, want it eternally.”
Recognizing the convergence of their interests, Foucault and Sollers struck up a brief collaboration. The young editor, as one witness has recalled, was “superbly intelligent, lavish in his expenditures, sensitive to every form of femininity: -- and an operator par excellence, unswervingly dedicated to his own “cult of success.” Sollier’s alliance with Foucault would not last long: Sollers was too facile and fashion-conscious, Foucault too prickly and difficult... In a roman a clef published years later, Julia Kristeva, one of the most prominent members of the Tel quel group (she would eventually marry Sollers), portrayed the philosopher in the most disturbing terms, as the high priest of a blasphemous new cult, built around “the adoration of death.” This was too much for Sollers and his friends. For all their talk about forging a convulsive new style of art, the Tel quel ideal in literature, as in life, was aristocratic -- an epitome of powerful appetites satisfied with “taste and tolerance.” It was in this spirit that Roland Barthes would reassure the journal’s readers that “the sole Sadian [Chrome suggests "Canadian" as a properly spelled alternative for "Sadian"] universe is the universe of his discourse.” The divine Marquis must therefore be read “according to a principle of tact.”
p129
Foucault obviously had somewhat different views about the nature of the “Sadian universe,” and much else besides... Sollers invited Foucault to lead a “Debate on the Novel” with members of the Tel quel group.
...”I am struck by one thing,” Foucault remarked. “In the novels I have read {by Robbe-Grillet and the writers linked with Tel quel} there is an endless reference to a certain number of experiences -- if you will, I would call these , in quotes, ‘spiritual experiences (though of course the word ‘spiritual’ is not good) -- like the dream, like madness, like unreason, like repetition, the double, the flight of time, the return, etc. These experiences form a constellation that is probably very coherent. I am struck by the fact that one finds this constellation sketched in nearly the same fashion by the surrealists.”
Given the obvious affinities of the “new novel” with surrealism, what, Foucault asks, are the differences? There are two major ones, he suggests. First, the notion of “experience” (for Sollers and, implicitly, for Foucault himself) has been separated from the domain of psychology, where Andre Breton, under the influence of Freud, had left it. Experience has become instead a matter for “thinking.” The credit for showing the way to this new, properly philosophical appreciation of “experience” Foucault gives to Bataille, Blanchot, and Robbe-Grillet.
p130
The second major difference, according to Foucault, is that for the surrealists language had merely been an instrument, a means of representing experience. For the writers grouped around Tel quel, by contrast (and, again, implicitly for himself), language is an end in itself “the book” becomes an “experience” in its own right. Literature now conveys a “thought that speaks:” it is a “thinking word.”
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