Alain Robbe-Grillet (trans. Barbara Wright)
From Realism to Reality
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This essay by Alain Robbe-Grillet originally appeared in the May 1965 edition of The London Magazine, translated from the French by Barbara Wright.
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Every writer thinks he is a realist. No writer ever calls himself abstract, an illusionist, a visionary, a fantast, a falsifier. … Realism is not a dearly-defined theory by reference to which we can classify some writers as being opposed to others; on the contrary, it is a flag flown by the immense majority – if not the sum total – of present-day novelists. And on this point, we should probably believe them all. What interests them is the real world – they are all wholly occupied in trying to create the ‘real’.
But if they all meet under this flag, it is by no means in order to fight a common battle, it’s to tear each other apart. Realism is the ideology each one throws in his neighbour’s face, the quality each thinks he is the only one to possess. And it has always been the same; it was in the name of realism that each new literary school wanted to destroy the one that preceded it; this was the watchword the romantics used against the classicists, and later, the naturalists against the romantics, and even the surrealists were to claim that the world they occupied was none other than the real world. So the realism that writers discuss seems to be as diversified as Descartes’ ‘common sense’.
Here, too, we can only conclude that they are all right. And if they don’t agree, it’s because each has his own idea of reality. The classic writers thought it was classic, the romantics thought it was romantic, the surrealists that it was surreal, Claudel that its nature was divine, Camus that it was absurd, and ‘committed writers’ that it is primarily economic, and must lead to socialism. They are all talking about the world as they see it, but none sees it in the same way.
The discovery of reality can only continue its advance if people are willing to abandon outworn forms.
And in any case, it is easy to see why literary revolutions are always brought about in the name of realism. When a style of writing has lost its initial vitality, force and violence, when it has become a vulgar recipe, an academic formula that its followers only respect out of routine or laziness, without even questioning its necessity, there is no doubt that we need a return to the real in order to challenge the old formulae and find new forms to take their place. The discovery of reality can only continue its advance if people are willing to abandon outworn forms. Unless we consider that by now the world has already been totally discovered (in which case the best thing would be to give up writing completely), all we can do is try and go further. Which doesn’t mean ‘producing something better’, but advancing into as yet unknown paths, where a new sort of writing becomes a necessity.
But what will be the use of this, you will ask, if it’s only going to end, sooner or later, in a new formalism, whose arteries will soon have become just as hardened as those of the old? This is the same as asking why we should live, since we have to die and make room for other living people. Art is life. It never gains anything permanently. It cannot exist without this perpetual re-evaluation. But it is this interaction between its various evolutions and revolutions that its perpetual rebirth is contained.
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And anyway, the world is changing, too. On the one hand there are many respects in which it is no longer objectively the same as it was a hundred years ago, for instance; our material life, our intellectual life and our political life have been considerably modified, as has the physical aspect of our towns, our houses, our villages, our roads, etc. And on the other hand our knowledge of what surrounds us (our scientific knowledge, whether it is a question of the sciences of matter or the sciences of man) has similarly undergone some extraordinary upheavals. Because of this our subjective relations with the world have changed completely.
The objective modifications of reality, in conjunction with the progress of our knowledge of the physical world, have had – and are still having – profound repercussions on our philosophical conceptions, our metaphysics, our ethics. Even if the novel confined itself to reproducing reality, then, it would hardly be normal if the bases of its realism had not evolved in a parallel direction to these transformations. To give an account of what is real today, the nineteenth-century novel would not at all be the ‘good tool’ from which Soviet criticism – still with more calm assurance than the bourgeois critics – is always reproaching the New Novel of trying to depart. It could still serve (so they tell us) to show the people the evils of the world of today and the fashionable remedies, with, if need be, some slight improvements of a detail or two, as if it were a question of perfecting a hammer or a sickle. To keep to this metaphor of the tool, no one would consider a combine-harvester a perfected version of the sickle; a fortiori a machine which was used for a harvest which had nothing to do with corn.
But there are more serious implications. The novel isn’t a tool at all. It is not conceived as a work which can be defined in advance. Its purpose is not to expose, and translate, things that existed before it did, outside itself. It does not express, it seeks. And what it is seeking, is itself.
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Academic criticism, both in the West and the Communist countries, uses the word ‘realism’ as if reality were already completely established (whether for ever or not) by the time the writer comes on the scene. So it considers that the writer’s job is limited to ‘exploring’ and ‘expressing’ the reality of his time.
Everyone sees his own version of reality in the world.
Realism, according to this view, asks no more of the novel than that it should respect the truth. The qualities demanded of the author, then, would be primarily perspicacity in observation and a constant concern with frankness (often allied to outspokenness). Leaving on one side the absolute repugnance felt by socialist realists towards adultery and sexual deviations, it then comes down to the undisguised painting of unpleasant or distressing scenes (without being afraid, ironically enough, of shocking the reader) paying particular attention, of course, to the material problems of life, and primarily to the domestic problems of the poor. Factories and shanty-towns, then, are by their very nature more ‘realistic’ than sloth or luxury, and adversity is more realistic than happiness. The writer should only, in short, attribute crude colours and meanings to the world, according to a more or less debased formula used by Emile Zola.
Now all this completely loses its meaning the moment we realise that not only does everyone sees his own version of reality in the world, but that it is precisely the novel that creates this reality. Fiction writing, unlike reportage, eye-witness accounts or scientific descriptions, isn’t trying to give information – it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is looking for, it doesn’t know what it has to say; it is invention, invention of the world and of man, constant, and continually self-questioning invention. All those – whether politicians or others – who only want to find stereotypes in books, and who, more than anything else, are afraid of the spirit of enquiry, can only be on their guard against literature.
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I, like everyone else, have had the experience of being a momentary victim of the realistic illusion. When I was writing The Voyeur, for instance, while I was desperately trying to describe in detail the flight of the seagulls and the movement of the waves, I had occasion to make a brief winter trip to the Brittany coast. On my way there I said to myself: this is a good opportunity to observe things ‘from life’ and to ‘refresh my memory’. … But the moment I saw my first sea bird I realised how wrong I had been: on the one hand the seagulls I was now seeing had only the vaguest connection with the ones I was describing in my book, and on the other hand I was quite indifferent to this fact. The only seagulls that mattered to me at that moment were the ones in my mind. They too had probably come, in one way or another, from the external world, and perhaps even from Brittany, but they had been transformed, and at the same time had seemed to become more real, because they were now imaginary.
Sometimes, too, when I am irritated by objections like: ‘Things just don’t happen like that in life’, ‘There’s no such hotel as the one in your Marienbad’, ‘A jealous husband doesn’t behave like the one in your jealousy’, ‘The Turkish adventures that happened to your Frenchman, in l’Immortelle, are very unlikely’, ‘Your lost soldier in The Labyrinth doesn’t wear his military badges in the right place’, etc., I try and bring my own arguments down to the realistic level and I talk of the subjective existence of the hotel, or of the direct psychological truth (and hence, not subject to analysis) of the anxious husband who is fascinated by his wife’s suspect (or too natural) behaviour. And I certainly hope that my novels and films can also be justified from this point of view. But I know very well that what I am saying is something quite different. I don’t transcribe, I construct. That was already Flaubert’s old ambition: starting from nothing, to build something capable of standing on its own feet, without having to lean on anything whatsoever exterior to the work. This is the ambition of every contemporary novel.
We can see how far ‘likelihood’, and things being ‘true to type’, are from being able to serve as criteria any longer. Everything happens, even, as if the false – what is, in other words, at the same time possible, impossible, hypothesis and lies, etc. – had become one of the privileged themes of modern fiction. A new sort of narrator has been born, here: he is not only a man who describes the things he sees, but he is at the same time a person who is inventing the things that surround him, and seeing the things he is inventing. The moment these hero-narrators start to become in any way like ‘characters’, they also become liars, schizophrenics or the victims of hallucinations (or even writers, who are creating their own story). In this perspective we must stress the importance of the novels of Raymond Queneau (in particular Le Chiendent and Loni de Rueil) whose plots often, and movements always, belong strictly to the imagination.
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In this new realism, therefore, there is no longer the slightest question of verisimilitude. The little detail which ‘makes you think it’s true’ is no longer of any interest to the novelist, either on the stage of the world or in literature. The thing that strikes him – and which reappears, after several reincarnations, in what he writes – is more likely, on the contrary, to be the little detail that strikes a false note.
Thus, even in something written so long ago as Kafka’s diary, when he makes a note of what he has seen during the day while he was out for a walk, for instance, almost the only things he remembers are fragments that are not only unimportant, but that also appeared to him out of the context of their meaning and hence of their likelihood – from the stone, all by itself, no one knows why, in the middle of the road, to the peculiar, unfinished, awkward gesture made by someone passing by, which seems to have neither function nor precise intention. Parts of objects, or objects divorced from their functions, immobilised moments, words taken out of their context, or, even several conversations jumbled up together, everything that rings slightly false, everything that seems unnatural, these are just what ring the truest to the novelist’s ear.
Are we now dealing with what people call the absurd? Certainly not. For, in any case, a perfectly rational and commonplace element suddenly forces itself on our attention in the same unmistakable way – a presence without a cause, a necessity without a reason. It just is, and that’s all there is to it. But there is a risk for the writer: with the suspicion of absurdity, the metaphysical danger returns. Non-sense, a-causality and insubstantiality irresistibly attract other-worlds and super-natures.
Kafka’s misfortune in this domain is a case in point. This realistic author (in the new meaning of the word as we are trying to define it: a creator of a material world, with a visionary presence) is also the one who has been the most overloaded with meaning – with ‘profound’ meaning – by his admirers and exegetists. He very quickly became, in the eyes of the public, more than anything else the man who was pretending to tell us things about this world with the sole aim of giving us a glimpse of the problematical existence of a ‘beyond’. Thus he describes the tribulations of his obstinate (false) surveyor among the inhabitants of the village, but his novel is supposed to have no other interest than to make us dream of the near and far life of a mysterious castle. When he shows us the offices, the staircases and the corridors where Joseph K. … goes in pursuit of justice, it is supposed to be solely to preach the theological notion of ‘grace’ to us. And so with all the rest.
Kafka’s stories, then, are said to be nothing but allegorical. Not only, according to this view, do they call for an explanation (which would give such a perfect précis of them as to drain them of all their content), but this meaning also effectively and radically destroys the tangible universe that constitutes the story. Literature, in any case, would always, and systematically, consist of talking about something else. There would be a world that was present, and a real world; the first would be the only visible one, the second the only important one. The novelist would be supposed to act as a mediator: by his fake description of visible – but completely unreal – things, he would evoke the ‘real’ which was hiding behind them.
To explain meanings that are already known goes against the most important demand of literature.
Now the one thing we find convincing, on the contrary, when we read him with an unprejudiced eye, is the absolute reality of the things Kafka describes. The visible world of his novels is certainly, for him, the real world, and what is behind it (if there is anything) seems to be valueless in comparison with the evidence of the objects, actions, words, etc. The hallucinating effect comes from their extraordinary clarity, and not from any indecision or vagueness. There is no doubt that nothing is more fantastic than precision. Perhaps Kafka’s staircases do lead somewhere else, but they are there, you look at them, stair by stair, and follow the details of the banisters. Perhaps his grey walls are hiding something, but one’s memory stops short at them, at their cracked plaster, and at their lizards. Even what the hero is searching for disappears before the obstinacy with which he pursues it, his journeying, and his movements, which are the only things Kafka makes us aware of, the only real things. Throughout the work, man’s relationship with the world, far from being symbolic, is always direct and immediate.
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Exactly the same thing applies to profound metaphysical meanings as to political, psychological or ethical meanings. To explain the ones that are already known goes against the most important demand of literature. As for those novels which, later on, will have contributed to the world of the future, the wisest thing (and also the most honest, and shrewdest, thing), is not to bother about them yet. For the last twenty years we have been able to judge how little remains of the Kafkan universe in the works of his self-styled descendants, who confined themselves to reproducing his metaphysical content and forgot about the master’s realism.
What remains, then, is the immediate meaning of things (which is descriptive, partial, and continually being called into question), what is within the story, that is, and within the plot, as the profound (and transcendent) meaning is beyond it. From now on it is on this that our research and creative efforts will be concentrated. There can be no question of getting rid of this, for fear of seeing the plot get the upper hand, and soon, even, become transcendent; (metaphysics likes a void, and becomes engulfed in one like smoke up the chimney); for within the immediate meaning we find the absurd, which is, theoretically, non-existent meaning, but which in fact immediately leads, by a well-known metaphysical recoupment, to a new transcendence. And the infinite fragmentation of the sense thus creates a new totality, which is equally dangerous and equally useless. Within, once more, there is no longer anything but the sound of the words.
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But the new levels of meaning in language which we have just pointed out are in many ways mutually conflicting. And the new realism is likely to destroy some of these theoretical contradictions. Life today, and science today, have gone beyond many of the categorical antinomies established by the rationalism of previous centuries. It is natural that the novel which, like all art, aims at anticipating our systems of thought and not following them, should already be bringing about the mutual dissolution of the two terms of other pairs of contraries: content-form, objectivity-subjectivity, construction-destruction, memory-present, imagination-reality, etc.
We are continually hearing on all sides, from the extreme right to the extreme left, that this new art is unhealthy, decadent, inhuman and morbid. But the good health to which this judgment refers is that of blinkers and formalin – that of death. We are always decadent in comparison to the things of the past: reinforced concrete compared to stone, Socialism compared to paternal monarchy, Proust compared to Balzac. And it can hardly be called inhuman to want to build a new life for man; life only seems morbid if we are so busy regretting its old colours that we don’t try to see the new beauties illuminating it. What the art of today offers the reader and the spectator is, in any case, a way of living in the world as it is today and of participating in the permanent creation of the world of tomorrow. For this to be achieved, all that the new novel asks of the public is that it should still have confidence in the power of literature, and the public asks the novelist to stop being ashamed of creating literature.
An extremely hackneyed idea about the ‘new novel’ – and this ever since people started writing articles about it – is that it is a ‘passing fashion’. This opinion, the moment you give it a little thought, appears doubly ridiculous. Even if you classify this or that sort of writing as a fashion (and indeed, you will always find imitators who see the way the wind is blowing and copy modern forms without feeling their necessity, without even understanding their function and, of course, without seeing that their use, to say the least, requires a certain discipline), the New Novel would still be, putting it at the very lowest, the fashionable movement that demands that fashions should be destroyed as fast as they are created, so that new ones shall continually be recreated. And that forms of fiction are passing, is precisely what the New Novel says!
All we can see in this type of remark – about passing fashions, rebels coming to their senses, a return to healthy traditions, and other cockeyed notions – is the usual, good old attempt to prove, imperturbably and desperately, that ‘fundamentally, nothing ever changes’, and that there is ‘nothing new under the sun’; whereas the truth is that everything is always changing and that there is always something new. Academic critics even try to make the public believe that the new techniques are simply going to be absorbed by the ‘eternal’ novel, and will be used to perfect some detail or other of the Balzacian character, of the chronological plot, or of transcendent humanity.
It is possible that this day will in fact come, and even fairly soon. But the moment the New Novel starts ‘to be used for something’, whether it be psychological analysis, the catholic novel, or socialist-realism, it will be the sign for its inventors that a New New Novel is demanding to be born, whose purpose no one yet knows anything about – unless it is to serve the cause of literature.
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Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French writer and filmmaker.
Barbara Wright was an English translator of modern French literature.
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