BOO KS
131
For many critics, the novel seemed to answer the question that they
had been posing, rather inanely, in frequent
enquetes:
what was to fol–
low the
nouveau roman
of Robbe-Grillet, Butor and Nathalie Sarraute?
Le Clezio, undoubtedly influenced by these masters, yet clearly un–
contaminated by the philosophical jargon of any coterie, seemed an
important new manifestation in a tradition of rigidly uncompromising
experimental fiction.
Like Robbe-Grillet before him,
Le
CIezio takes as an initial premise
the need to renew our perception of the world, to view phenomena
from a new and starkly nonlogical, noncausative standpoint.
Le Proces–
verbal,
as its French title suggests (Daphne Woodward's English sub–
stitution,
The Interrogation,
seems to me, like much of her rather
stilted translation, to miss the point), is an affidavit of experience, a
careful record of the movements and sensations of a man called Adam
PolIo who is uncertain whether he has just left the insane asylum or
the army. Adam has attempted to strip himself of the impedimenta
of culture; he lives a life of immediate, primitive, preverbal contact
with objects, a life of non-egoism and pure being. With concentration,
he can feel himself metamorphosed into a white rat, or he can reverse
the processes of evolution and become a lichen clinging to a rock. He
folIows a dog through the city streets, looking forward to a time when
he
too
may be able to "urinate placidly against the hubs of American
cars or the 'No Parking' signs and make love in the open air, on the
dusty footpath, between two plane trees."
Life in a world of nonreferential experience does not, however, seem
to be totally possible. Adam himself is tempted by words-he writes
letters he never sends-and by personal relationships. It is his desperate
need to explain, the temptation to verbalize his sensations, it would
seem, that drives him to harangue a crowd in the street, be arrested
for an unspecified "indecent display," and finish in a mental ward,
a womb which marks the failure of his attempt to communicate his
vision. In the hospital, under the questioning of a psychiatrist, he does
begin to provide a systematic verbal explanation of his perceptions-–
which is at the same time an explanation of our complicity with this
oddly sympathetic figure-but the attempt ends in aphasia, collapse
and a psychiatric diagnosis.
The diagnosis is relevant only in verbal, cultural and social terms,
that is, irrelevant to the protagonist'S, and the novelist's, demand for
a conversion of our perceptual systems. What is most admirable about
The Interrogation
is its effort to situate the reader in a universe dense
with sensations precisely and literally evoked, and to prevent his
