The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal Page B

survived only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future.

    Here, as so often in Robbe-Grillet’s theorizing, one is offered a sensible statement, followed by a dubious observation about survival (many conventional, even reactionary works have survived nicely), ending with a look-to-the-dawn-of-a-new-age chord, played fortissimo. Yet the desire to continue the modern tradition is perfectly valid. And even if the New Novelists do not succeed (in science most experiments fail), they are at least “really serious,” as Miss Sontag would say.
    There is, however, something very odd about a literary movement so radical in its pronouncements yet so traditional in its references. Both Miss Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet continually relate themselves to great predecessors, giving rise to the suspicion that, like Saul Bellow’s literary usurpers, they are assuming for themselves the accomplishments of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, and Beckett. In this, at least, they are significantly more modest than their heroes. One cannot imagine the Joyce of
Finnegans Wake
acknowledging a literary debt to anyone or Flaubert admitting—as Robbe-Grillet does—that his work is “merely pursuing a constant evolution of a genre.” Curiously enough, the writers whom Robbe-Grillet and Miss Sarraute most resemble wrote books which were described by Arthur Symons for the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
as being

    made up of an infinite number of details, set side by side, every detail equally prominent…. [the authors] do not search further than “the physical basis of life,” and they find everything that can be known of that unknown force written visibly upon the sudden faces of little incidents, little expressive movements…. It is their distinction—the finest of their inventions—that, in order to render new sensations, a new vision of things, they invented a new language.

    They
, of course, are the presently unfashionable brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, whose collaboration ended in 1870.
    In attacking the traditional novel, both Robbe-Grillet and Miss Sarraute are on safe ground. Miss Sarraute is particularly effective when she observes that even the least aware of the traditionalists seems “unable to escape a certain feeling of uneasiness as regards dialogue.” She remarks upon the self-conscious way in which contemporary writers sprinkle their pages with “he saids” and “she replieds,” and she makes gentle fun of Henry Green’s hopeful comment that perhaps the novel of the future will be largely composed in dialogue since, as she quotes him, people don’t write letters any more: they use the telephone.
    But the dialogue novel does not appeal to her, for it brings “the novel dangerously near the domain of the theater, where it is bound to be in a position of inferiority”—on the ground that the nuances of dialogue in the theater are supplied by actors while in the novel the writer himself must provide, somehow, the sub-conversation which is the true meaning. Opposed to the dialogue novel is the one of Proustian analysis. Miss Sarraute finds much fault with this method (no meaningful depths left to plumb in the wake of Freud), but concedes that “In spite of the rather serious charges that may be brought against analysis, it is difficult to turn from it today without turning one’s back on progress.”
    â€œProgress,” “
New
Novel,” “permanent creation of tomorrow’s world,” “the discovery of reality will continue only if we abandon outward forms,” “general evolution of the genre”…again and again one is reminded in reading the manifestos of these two explorers that we are living (one might even say that we are trapped) in the age of science. Miss Sarraute particularly delights in using quasi-scientific references. She refers to her first