lOOKS
263
are by Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille, and Pierre Klossowski; most
of these were written in the 1940's and are as yet untranslated into
English. Better known, and mostly translated, are a "second generation"
of books written in the 1950's, by (among others) Michel Butor, Alain
Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, and Nathalie Sarraute. All these books,
however they differ from each other-whether crammed with Heideg–
gerian phenomenology, behaviorist psychology, or plain old numerology
-have this in common: they are difficult to read, and they are largely
boring. They are not literally unreadable, or unlikeable. I'm fond of and,
when fortified by dexamyl, able to read Blanchot, Bataille, and Klossow–
ski with pleasure; and there are pages of Nathalie Sarraute that I admire
very much. Yet it is a taste I cannot wholeheartedly defend; for as
novels these books are maddening, and I have never been able
to
read
any of them straight through. But I console myself with the thought
that that's what these writers intend. They want to bore the reader, to
tax him with their subcutaneous ruminations and dry enumerations and
inventories of things, their interminable slow-motion descriptions of
doors opening and nameless persons advancing across unidentified rooms.
They want to frustrate the reader, by purposely withholding a plot
and a clearly distinguishable cast of characters. These writers want to
make the reader work for his pleasure. Ultimately, they would rather
not give pleasure at all, but just make the reader work.
Such novels, as I see it, are mainly designed to be written, only
secondarily to be read. What is important is that they have been
written and published and noticed-that is, received into the on-going
tradition of the novel. I'm not for a moment suggesting any literary
fraud. There can be no doubt of the refined intelligence and absolute
sincerity of these writers, and of their wish to be read (their demand
that the reader put himself into harness and go to work). Still, it
is more fun to read about their books than to read them. And most
fun of all, to read a brilliantly written manifesto by the best of the
recent French novelists, Nathalie Sarraute, in which the theory behind
her novels is fully and elegantly set forth.
When reading the four essays of Nathalie Sarraute that make
up
The Age o{ Suspicion,
I kept thinking of two other manifestoes on
what the novel should be, Viriginia Woolf's "Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown" and Mary McCarthy's "The Fact in Fiction." Sarraute scorns as
"naive" Virginia Woolf's dismissal of naturalism and objective realism,
her call to the modem novelist to examine "the dark places of psy–
chology." But Sarraute is equally hard on the position represented by
Mary McCarthy's essay, mhich may be read as a rebuttal of Virginia
