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The
Nouveau Roman and Writing in Britain after Modernism
Adam
Guy
Oxford
English Monographs Oxford:
University Press, 2019 Hardcover.
xi+233 p. ISBN 978-0198850007. £60
Reviewed by Catherine
Bernard Université
de Paris
A monograph on the influence of the nouveau roman on British literature was
long overdue and Adam Guy’s study does more than merely reflect on the inter-cultural crosscurrents that carried the
influence of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Nathalie Sarraute across the Channel. It
offers a detailed and enlightening account of the history of the complex
acculturation of the nouveau roman to
the British literary scene. Reading this phenomenon from a dual cultural
perspective – that of the French history of the modern novel and that of the
history of post- or late-Modernist writing in Britain, it offers a truly
trans-cultural interpretation of a literary phenomenon, its development and
legacy. Delving into the history of the “movement” in France, from its
inception to its dissolution, but also into the complex history of its
translations into English, the misconstructions it elicited in England, as well
as the paradoxical continuity the English avatars of the nouveau roman evinced with Modernism, it elaborates a multi-angled
exploration of literary history, reminding the reader that literature should
not be reduced to its sole aesthetic mutations. As Adam Guy – a Departmental
Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford – amply shows, such mutations
are themselves the products of complex interactions between the history of
publishing, the economy of translation and that most intangible of material:
the constructions and misconceptions each culture produces of other cultures,
including in the field of literature. In that sense, The Nouveau Roman and Writing
in Britain after Modernism also offers a stimulating case study of the
infinitely ramifying logic of cross-cultural dialogue. Adam Guy needed more than
a firm grasp of the two literary contexts, on both sides of the Channel, and
one can only be struck by the impeccable knowledge of both literary scenes, a
knowledge grounded in thorough archival work done in publishers’ archives – Calder
& Boyars’ or Jonathan Cape’s – as well as the Arts Council’s archive which
all reveal how complex and intense the promotion and reception of the nouveau roman were in Britain. Such
attentive archival work grants Guy’s analysis its attentiveness and scrupulous
care for what makes the vibrancy of any literary scene, its contradictions and
blind spots, its dynamics and organicity. Grounded in the exacting grammar of
literary history, it also builds on the reconstruction of a context in order to
inflect the established historiography of influences and reactions that has
dominated our understanding of British literature’s development since
Modernism. As Adam Guy explains in his introduction, the book’s aim is thus
twofold: By looking at the nouveau roman at its point of emergence
in a foreign literary field, I try to understand the meanings and functions
that the nouveau roman once had for a
wide range of readers and writers. In the process, this book makes the case for
the centrality of the nouveau roman
to many histories of post-war literature. [2] Guy thus offers a
counter-literary history in which the so far dominant received logic of
reaction and counter-reaction to Modernism is reassessed. The accepted history
of Modernism’s inheritance has traditionally opposed experimentation and more conventional,
counter-modernist modes of representation, this binary tension being best
captured in Rubin Rabinovitz’s 1967 essay The
Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950-1960, and, as
stressed at the beginning of chapter 4 – “New Realism and ‘the times at hand’” –
in the rise of the Angry Young Men and of the Movement in the 1950s. As
acknowledged by Adam Guy, many prominent literary figures, among whom David
Lodge and Iris Murdoch, did offer “more nuanced view[s]” [121] and many later
critics also reread that binarism in order to defend a “less totalizing side to
this story” (one may mention Andrzej Gasiorek,
Patricia Waugh or Sebastien Groes [see 122]). Guy’s study offers a revaluation
of their own displacement of the alleged dialectics of experimentation and
reaction, by disclosing the, even now, less explored history of the nouveau roman’s dissemination and impact
on British literature. Rather than, as might be expected, focus on the
allegedly direct influence of the nouveau
roman on B.S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quinn or Alan
Burns, the book broadens the perspective. “Beginning with the nouveau roman’s gradual appearance in
the British public sphere in 1957, and ending in the early 1970s”, the book’s
claim is “that, in Britain, the nouveau
roman became a focal point for discussion of the numerous significations and
modalities of the ‘new’” [19], a new that could not be understood as being
exclusively indebted to Modernism. One of the most remarkable achievements of the essay lies in its capacity
to methodically map a specific field, at the point of articulation of literary
history, the history of publishing and of translation, culture and aesthetics. The very
structure of the book testifies to this desire to unhinge the established
reading grid of Modernism’s legacy in order to delineate more complex and often
contradictory cultural currents. Rather than opening on the well-charted literary
debates whose terms were defined by the 1950s realists, and subsequently by Rabinovitz,
Guy chooses to anchor his study in the history of the nouveau roman’s transfer and reception in the UK, thus showing to
what extent the later reading of a neat dialectics between innovation and
tradition has been an after-the-fact construction validating a certain history
of literary practices and hierarchies. The introduction itself grounds the
analysis in a wide international literary history in order to contradict the
supposed insularity of the world of British letters in the second half of the
20th century. Retracing the “emergence of the nouveau roman” [2-8] with a great attention to the publishing
history of Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon or Marguerite Duras, it identifies what
also characterised the reception and influence of the nouveau roman in the UK, i.e.
the at times self-contradictory nature of what was never a coherent group and
even less of a movement. Reading Robbe-Grillet’s powerful “dictum” to be found
in Pour un nouveau roman (1963): “the
world is neither significant nor absurd. It is,
quite simply”, Guy pits the conflicted emphasis on reality against the dominant
vein of Sartrian Existentialism, thus, from the start, proposing an alternative
take on the debate surrounding realism and its emphasis on a classically
humanist conception of representation: “Such a precept [Robbe-Grillet’s
“dictum”] results in the call for a fiction where the human is profoundly
decentred, resulting in writing purged of anthropomorphism and metaphor” [11]. The ongoing reappraisal
of fiction’s relation to reality remains one of the guiding threads of the
essay, hence the importance of Robbe-Grillet’s chosisme and its emphasis on tangible reality since it brings
literature to reinvent its own language and its grasp of the world of things,
through description, among other literary strategies. As such, chosisme itself blurred the frontiers of
experimentation and realism, of “the new” and tradition, and testified to the
instability of the conventional categories structuring literature, and Britain’s
culture at large, thus offering possibilities “for a reconfigured type of
realism, decoupled from the aesthetic and political conservatism with which
figures like Snow had imbued the concept in the years following the Second
World War” [24]. Building on the
recontextualisation achieved in the introduction, part I of the essay – “Circulation”
– focuses on the “dissemination” and “reception” of the nouveau roman in Britain. Its two chapters bring under renewed
light the strategic influence of the initial publishers of Robbe-Grillet and
Sarraute, then of Michel Butor – Calder & Boyars – as well as the
importance of the literary agents who were instrumental in the dissemination of
French writing in the UK: Rosica Colin, who was Robbe-Grillet’s agent, and also
represented Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Albert Camus, and Renée
Spodheim who was Sarraute’s agent across the Anglophone world. Guy also traces
the not so coherent history of the introduction of the works of the nouveau roman, also reminding us of the
fact Claude Simon’s first five novels were published by Jonathan Cape [37]. A
whole cultural, economic and political context is here reconstructed, in which
the reception of the likes of Simon or Sarraute must also be read within a
broader international context. For Adam Guy, Calder & Boyars’ decisive
publication of Henry Miller’s Tropic of
Cancer (1934, published in Britain in 1963) and of Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), that both
challenged the British obscenity law and were prosecuted, also underlines the
strategic place of the nouveau roman
at the heart of a vibrant and highly politicised literary scene. Just as
crucially, Calder & Boyars’ embrace of such controversial literary figures,
alongside those of William Burroughs or Samuel Beckett, went with the staunch
conviction that “an aesthetic based in ruptural ‘disbelief’ and ‘revolution’
[could] be relied upon to embed a ‘good life’ and a shared Arnoldian culture
for an existing mass public” [33]. Chapter I provides a careful evocation of
Calder & Boyars’ publishing strategies, from the choice of covers [41], to
the organisation of promotional tours for Simon or Robbe-Grillet [57-63], the
engineering of efficient advertising campaigns extolling the nouveau romanciers as already “literary
classics,” belonging to the “eternal present of consecrated culture” [47],
while positing their potential for reinventing the “avant-garde” novel as “a
mass form” [50]. Just as enlightening
is the study of the reception of the nouveau
romanciers in chapter 2 and that of their translations in chapter 3, the
first one of part II entitled “Impact”. Meticulously mapping the cultural and
ideological context of the nouveau roman’s
reception in the UK, Guy traces the misconstructions that also contributed to
its reputation, and that are often of the essence of trans-cultural transfers:
“not only were newly published nouveaux
romans framed through inaccurate accounts of the nouveau roman itself, but they were also described through
inaccurate analogies to an inaccurately understood Existentialism” [76]. Once
again one can only be struck by Adam Guy’s attention to the complex granularity
of ideological debate. Anyone interested in the intellectual history of Britain
in the 1950s and 1960s will relish the text’s capacity to immerse us in the
rich and agonistic debates that agitated the British cultural scene and to
revive figures such as Maurice Cranston, writing for London Magazine, John Weightman, Rayner Heppenstall or John
Sturrock, all crossing swords in the Times
Literary Supplement [66-71]. Making a detour via the nouvelle vague and its associations with the nouveau roman, chapter 2 avails itself of the persistent
associations traced at the time between the nouveau
roman and cinema, and turns to Alain Resnais’ collaboration with Duras (Hiroshima mon amour, 1959) and
Robbe-Grillet (L’année dernière à
Marienbad, 1961), to once more probe the cultural make-up of the “new” as
an aesthetic and ideological category, in turn flaunted and debunked by the
custodians of and opponents to Modernism. Corroborating the
paradigm of cultural misprision developed in chapter 2, chapter 3 “Translation
and transition” weaves the not so
linear thread of the nouveau roman’s
artistic bond with Modernism further. Steeped in the history of the translation
into English of continental avant-garde writing and philosophy – Simon’s Les corps conducteurs (1971) and Triptyque (1977) were both translated by
Helen R. Lane who, we learn, also translated Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s Anti-Œdipus [103] – the
chapter turns in detail to the impact of Maria Jolas’ translations of
Sarraute’s works. The connection with Modernism comes here into sharpened
focus, Maria Jolas having been a close associate of the modernist scene, via
her husband Eugene Jolas, an association that may account for Sarraute’s
modernist inflections in English [104-115] and that is contrasted [116-117] with
Barbara Wright’s options in her translations of Raymond Queneau’s earlier Exercices de style (1947). Chapter 4 – “New Realism
and ‘the times at hand’” – embeds the nouveau
roman in an even more complex and ramified intellectual and ideological
context. Returning to the treatment and function of reality and of chosisme by the nouveaux romanciers, as well as to their distrust of conventional
humanism, it reads their controversial reception in the UK as testifying to the
violence of the war waged against Modernism by the likes of C.P. Snow in his
1958 essay “Challenge to the Intellect”. Snow’s rejection of the nouveau roman was in line with his aversion
to Modernism, its 1950s avatar being, in his eyes, “simply the aberrant
repetition of an already aberrant literary tendency” [125]. But for writers
such as Muriel Spark or B.S. Johnson, the nouveau
roman provided “a literary template for realism and a new realism” [146]. What
was at stake in the capacity of fiction to imagine a “resinscribed realism” [146]
was above all the potential of the novel to speak of and to the present and
confront itself to its own historicity. Chapter 5 pits such self-reflexiveness
against a historical background – “the End of Empire” – that required a
rearming of formalism for a critical confrontation with history in the making.
Taking the example of Robbe-Grillet’s La
Jalousie (1957), Guy highlights the contrasting readings the novel
elicited. If, for some critics, the novel’s apparent narcissism testified to a
denial of the colonial context – the action being set in a banana plantation, for others – among whom Fredric Jameson, in the wake of Jacques Leenhardt – the
novel’s referentiality cannot be ignored, its referent being “Africa, the
colonial situation, imperialism and neo-imperialism, racism, wars of national
liberation” [153]. The same complex realist inflexion is traced in Christine
Brooke-Rose’s Out (1964), Brian W.
Aldiss’s Report on Probability A (1968),
or Denis Williams’ The Third Temptation
(1968), Guy once again reading formalism against its apparent grain, in order
to highlight its complex criticity and taking the novel’s self-awareness as
opening onto a more profoundly historical awareness, the narrative being
“written from the material of a set of political conditions that are still being
negotiated” [170]. Chapter 6 – “The
‘tedium of interest’: Butorian Projects – more explicitly raises the question
of readerly reception, wondering to what extent the nouveau roman and its rearticulation of writing “at the border
between fiction and its theoretical metalanguage” [179] might be read as paving
the way for new modes of reading that later characterised postmodernist fiction
as defined by such critics as Brian McHale. The institutionalisation of
“Paranoid” reading [185], or of what Paul Ricœur termed “the hermeneutics of
suspicion” [186] somehow validated the nouveau
roman’s aesthetic options. Turning to B.S. Johnson’s Trawl (1966), Alan Sheridan’s Vacation
(1972) and Eva Figes’ B (1972), read
in parallel with Michel Butor’s L’Emploi
du temps (1956) and Degrés
(1960), the final chapter anticipates on the conclusion’s powerful
recapitulation of the productive contradictions of the nouveau roman and the way it “drew in a number of meaningful frames
for the historical understanding of works of art, whether aesthetic (the
nineteenth-century realist novel, modernism, postmodernism) or more broadly
historical (the status of being “postwar,” the end of the empire) [196].
Closing the gap with the present period, by turning to Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (2012), Zadie Smith’s essay
“Two Directions for the Novel” (2008) and Tom McCarthy’s essay Transmission and the Individual Remix
(2012), Guy reasserts the nouveau roman’s
relevance to our present exploration of fiction’s dual heritage in which the
realist imperative is woven into an exacting understanding of “newness” [204].
With its capacity to find “a new equilibrium” [204], the nouveau roman still remains, for Guy, a powerful inspiration for
“generations of writers to come” [204]. Erudite and
passionate, grounded in a vibrant knowledge of French and British intellectual
life, efficiently and elegantly
poised at the juncture of the history of publishing, of literary history, and
the aesthetics of reading, The
Nouveau Roman and Writing in Britain after
Modernism brings back to light a complex literary and intellectual
landscape. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary
literature and also in the critical debates that have shaped our understanding
of the function of fiction and its relevance to an enlightened understanding of
the historicity of reading.
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