RICHARD WASSON
reality, "to simply confront things." "It is no longer a matter of ap–
propriating them to oneself, of projecting anything into them but of
measuring the distance between self and things - without regret,
without hatred, without despair . . . ," without incorporating them
into a metaphorical or mythic unity.
Consequently, both Murdoch and Robbe-Grillet reject the spe–
cial position the moderns awarded to poetic language. "T. S. Eliot
and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to
undeIValue prose and deny it any imaginative function," Murdoch
says in "Against Dryness." Prose for Sartre and Eliot is only for
ex–
planation and exposition; it is essentially didactic and informative
and therefore cannot occupy the same realm as poetry. Robbe-Grillet
of course turns this notion of prose into a virtue, for it can ac–
curately measure and describe. Murdoch, however, does not share
Robbe-Grillet's enthusiasm for empirical prose as a style for fiction.
Instead she talks, rather vaguely, of restoring prose to its true imagina–
tive eloquence. She apparently wants to develop a prose style which
resists the prose-poetry dichotomy, and, were this an essay on her
novels, her experiments in such a style might occupy our attention.
Here one need only point out that both she and Robbe-Grillet re–
ject the modernist hierarchy of values which exalts poetic language.
Murdoch and Robbe-Grillet further share an animus against
encompassing structures; they find contingency and otherness lib–
erating, find freedom in alienation. They are suspicious of the at–
tempt to capture the whole in any description of reality; in fact
all
such descriptions are dangerously and misleadingly false. "There
is,"
Murdoch says, "no prefabricated harmony, no social totality, within
which we can come to comprehend differences as placed and re–
conciled. We have only a segment of the circle ... ," and to
try
for
the whole circle is to falsify human experience. Similarly, Robbe–
Grillet attacks the "Academic criticism of East and West" because
it assumes that "reality is already entirely constituted." Like Mur–
doch, he thinks that even if reality were so constituted, the human
mind and its language tools could never encompass it. Their protest
is not against
all
metaphoric usages, but primarily those which imply
a construction of reality that is finished, knowable, total. Often,
criticism of Robbe-Grillet assumes that he rejects
all
metaphor and
myth. But actually he recognizes that metaphors and fictions are
