PARTISAN REVIEW
465
As
a consequence Totalitarian Man erects, for both life and
art, a false value system. The work of art becomes, Murdoch says,
"the analogue of the lonely self-contained individual purged of
contingency." The ideal in life and art is not to mean, but to
be,
and to be
as
a uniquely self-contained piece of drama. A good poem
and a good person, according to this value system (perhaps most
clearly expressed by I.
A.
Richards), have the capacity to organize
ambiguities and paradoxes into a totality. Such procedure eliminates,
Murdoch argues, both contingency and otherness. In fiction this
sys–
tem implies that characters are not free personalities separate from
the author, but only projections of his conflicts. The modernist view
may lead us to create "a fantasy world of our own into which we
try to draw things from the outside, not grasping their reality and
independence, making them into dream objects of our own." Such
art Murdoch believes to be not the product of imagination but of
fantasy; the truly imaginative consists in the recognition of the
dis–
tance between self and other, of the unreconcilable nature of the
other: "Real people are destructive of myth; contingency
is
de–
structive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination."
Murdoch here comes close to the mood if not the program of
Robbe-Grillet. His sweeping attack on metaphor is based in part on
the perception that metaphor overcomes differences, contingencies
and opposites, and creates the illusion that
all
things are part of one
system. All too often metaphor implies the existence of an anthro–
pomorphic or at least anthropopathic "heart of the world." Metaphor
extended becomes a myth or a metaphysical system that binds man
to a continued and painful misapprehension of the world. Knowing
that things are indifferent to him, knowing that he can never arrive
at true correspondences, the poet nevertheless attempts to give this
world of disconnected particulars, this extraneous object, full of
other extraneous objects a symbolic unity. Such attempts are doomed
to failure; to continue to try to "recover the distance which exists
between man and things"
is
to turn human experience into a per–
petual failure, for self cannot
be
reconciled with indifferent things.
Therefore Robbe-Grillet rejects the novel of doubling and mir–
roring, the novel of ambiguity, the judgment that a "book will
be
true in proportion to its contradictions." Rather, to write a good
novel or to be a good person is to place oneself before contingent
