Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Samuel Beckett and the "Nouveau Roman"

Author(s): Melvin J. Friedman
Source: Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring - Summer,
1960), pp. 22-36
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207334
Accessed: 13-06-2016 19:38 UTC

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 SAMUEL BECKETT AND THE NO UVEA U ROMAN
BY MELVIN J. FRIEDMAN

MANY VAIN critical attempts have been made to define a direction for
the novel after Proust and Joyce. Manifestoes have appeared on both
sides of the Atlantic heralding the arrival of new schools of fiction; they
have carried such titles as "Une Voie pour le roman futur" (Alain
Robbe-Grillet), "The Vision Then and Now" (Paul Darcy Boles),
"L'tre du Soupqon" (Nathalie Sarraute). Most of these are the work
of practicing novelists who are trying to justify their craft-which has
been seriously questioned from T. S. Eliot's pronouncement on the death
of the novel in the 1923 Dial through Yvor Winter's dismissal of fiction
in the 1956 Hudson Review.
One of the most impressive of these attempts is Claude Mauriac's
recent volume, translated as The New Literature. Mauriac has less
of an axe to grind than most, despite the fact that he is the son of an
established novelist, since his own contribution is mainly as a critic. He
introduces a new critical term, "aliterature" (which he defines as "lit-
erature freed from the hackneyed conventions which have given the
word a pejorative meaning"), and derives modern literature from Franz
Kafka. He approaches the Czech writer not through the novels and
stories but through the Diaries and The Letters to Milena. He cuts
across linguistic boundaries and includes in his study such unlikely
bedfellows as Henry Miller, Georges Simenon, Antonin Artaud, and
Samuel Beckett. Mauriac justifies his "comparatist" excesses:
If a whole race of writers speak the same language today, it is because
they are releasers of the same secret. Even though they only know their
own drama and discuss only themselves, it is a matter of a common curse
and a search for a common salvation. To such an extent that the exegeses
of the writers in question are themselves interchangeable. Most critics
rewrite the same article indefinitely. Only the proper nouns change, while
those of Joyce and Kafka are found from one text to the other.
(The New Literature, New York, George Braziller, 1959, pp. 131-132)
By lumping "a whole race of writers" together Mauriac induces into ex-
istence a "nouveau roman." In the manner of the Old Testament god
he has formed from Kafka's rib a new school of novelists.
If we are not happy with Mauriac's choice of writers, we should
follow his line of "negation" from the French Symbolists through
Samuel Beckett:

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 Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman 23

After the silence of Rimbaud, the blank page of Mallarm6, the inarticulate
cry of Artaud, aliterature finally dissolves in alliteration with Joyce. The
author of Finnegans Wake in fact creates out of whole cloth words full of
so many diverse overtones that they are eclipsed by them. For Beckett,
on the contrary, words all say the same thing. In the extreme, it is by
writing anything at all that this author best expresses what he considers
important. The result is the same.
(The New Literature, pp. 12-13)

Two important statements are made here about Beckett: that he is not
an isolated figure completely cut off from tradition, and that his lan-
guage deliberately avoids careful nuance. Mauriac insists that in the
end there is little difference between the fear of words by Rimbaud and
Mallarme, the too many linquistic overtones by Joyce, the gush of un-
controlled language by Beckett.

Mauriac's is perhaps the most revealing discussion we have so far

about Samuel Beckett, the Irish writer who lives in Paris and writes
with equal facility in English and French. He has been part of two
cultures and seems to have assimilated ingredients from both; his in-
stinctive Irish wit balances his subterranean French pessimism. The
novels written in English, Murphy and Watt, are characteristically Irish
and light in tone; the prose works in French, Molloy, Malone meurt,
L'Innommable, and Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien, are somber and de-
pressing. Yet a certain ambience of anguish and violence is felt every-
where.

Perhaps this is because all of Beckett's novels are peopled by "gro-

tesques." Even the characters in Murphy and Watt-although they are
essentially comic novels-are pathetically disturbed types who are cap-
able of the fits of violence of many of the inhabitants of Winesburg,
Ohio. Beckett, like Sherwood Anderson, is a master at playing up the
insignificant causes of violent acts. Murphy's obsession with his rock-
ing chair, Malone's crazed search for his pencil stub, Molloy's attach-
ment to his "sucking stones" have the same ludicrous associations as
Dr. Reefy's paper pills, Wing Biddlebaum's fixation with his hands,
Enoch Robinson's fanciful animation of his room. These distortions
of the seemingly unimportant have something in common with the tote-
mistic practices of primitive man. Beckett's and Anderson's characters
appear to have reached that moment just before, as Kenneth Allsop has
said when speaking of Beckett, "the mind swings off its hinges."

But in Beckett and Anderson it is always the moment just before;

they never present the final stages of insanity. When Beckett's monolo-
gists, especially the "unnamable" of the last part of the Molloy trilogy,

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 24 Wisconsin Studies

feel that they can no longer distinguish between reality and imagination,
they are aware at least of the presence of the two possibilities. They are
gravely disturbed by the increasingly blurred vision of the real world
and they hold on to it tenaciously. This explains their painfully frequent,
what I have called in another context, "rites of identification." The un-
namable is intent on locating himself in space and time; he indicates his
spatial frustration at almost every turn:
... if I could describe this place, portray it, I've tried, I feel no place, no
place round me, there's no end to me, I don't know what it is, it isn't flesh,
it doesn't end, it's like air, now I have it, you say that, to say something,
you won't say it long, like gas, balls, balls, the place, then we'll see, first
the place, then I'll find me in it ...
(The Unnamable, New York, Grove Press, 1958, p. 157)

He expresses the same insecurity about time:

... I understand nothing about duration, I can't speak of it, oh I know I
speak of it, I say never and ever, I speak of the four seasons and the differ-
ent parts of the day and night, the night has no parts, that's because you
are asleep, the seasons must be very similar...
(The Unnamable, p. 169)
These are anguished outpourings, free from certain syntactical controls,
but there is evidence that the monologist is able to distinguish between
reality and imagination. His mind has not yet "swung off its hinges,"
calling for a fusion of the two domains in the manner of Don Quixote.
There is too much unrest for the calmness of the quixotic experience
which transforms all shaving bowls into knights' helmets, all windmills
into giants.
The connection of Beckett's creatures, then, with Anderson's "gro-
tesques" offers still another way of viewing a fictional menage who have
been previously referred to as "bums," "tramps," "hoboes," "anti-
heroes," and "outsiders." When we recall Anderson's famous paradox
of truth engendering falsehood, we begin to understand a good deal
about Beckett's characters:
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite
an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the
moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his
truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth
he embraced became a falsehood.
(Winesburg, Ohio, New York, Signet Book, 1956, p. 11)

This perhaps accounts for Murphy's restless odyssey which ends up in

an insane asylum, Watt's which ends up in a household run by deranged
people, Molloy's which ends up in a ditch, Malone's which ends up in an
unidentifiable bed in an unidentifiable room. Each seems to find a genu-

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 Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman 25

ine home in circumstances which are in defiance of accepted reality; each

seems to embrace a very special "truth" which the ordinary person
would find unacceptable and even impossible. For each of Beckett's
people we can say with Sherwood Anderson that "he became a grotesque
and the truth he embraced became a falsehood."

Beckett carries the grotesqueness, however, one stage beyond An-

derson. His people are not only at psychological disproportion with their
society but are also physically inept. Beckett catalogues for us through
some ten pages of Watt the physical disabilities of a family only remotely
connected to the main plot (what little there is) of the novel. There is
scarcely a character in all of Beckett, as has been said before, who is en-
tirely sound of limb. The number and extent of disability seem to in-
crease as one reads through his fiction, starting with the 1938 Murphy
and ending with the recent Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien. Beckett is
perhaps not the first writer to link so sharply the psychological with the
physical-Dostoevsky, Proust and Mann certainly have done it before
him-but no one else seems to have shaped it into an aesthetic, a con-
sistent principle of character development.

One aspect of this new method is the studied attempt on the author's
part to give his creatures an almost anonymous identity. Nathalie Sar-
raute has already commented on this tendency:

Aujourd'hui, un flot toujours grossissant nous inonde, d'oeuvres littiraires

qui pretendent encore etre des romans et ohi un 9tre sans contours, inde'-
finissable, insaisissable et invisible, un "je" anonyme qui est tout et qui
n'est rien et qui n'est le plus souvent qu'un reflet de l'auteur lui-meme, a
usurpe' le r61le du heros principal et occupe la place d'honneur.
(L'Ere du Soupqon, Paris, Gallimard, 1956, pp. 57-8)

This leads her to a further observation which is immediately applicable

to Beckett:

Mime le nom dont il lui faut, de toute ndcessit4, l'affubler, est pour le ro-
mancier une gene. Gide 6vite pour ses personnages les noms patronymi-
ques qui risquent de les planter d'emblee solidement dans un univers trop
semblable a celui du lecteur, et pre'fere les pre'noms peu usuels. Le hdros
de Kafka n'a pour tout nom qu'une initiale, celle de Kafka lui-mdme.
Joyce designe par H.C.E., initiales aux interpretations multiples, le heros
prote'i-forme de Finnegans Wake.'
(L'Ere du Soupqon, p. 72)

The reason for Beckett's names has already been the cause for consider-
able speculation. William York Tindall, for example, has been struck

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26 Wisconsin Studies

by the peculiarity of so many of Beckett's characters having either M

or W as a first initial. (The "M", as I have suggested elsewhere, may
be the first letter of the French word "mort" meaning death.) But it is
clear whatever the symbolical origin of Beckett's choice of initial con-
sonants, that the names he gives his characters tend towards the anony-
mous, the undistinguished. Murphy, Molloy, Malone, Macmann, Moran,
Watt, Worm, as names, tend to obliterate personality, to end in a "je"
who has no identity. These names are readily confused one with the
other, almost to the point of their owners melting together into one vast,
archetypal figure-a collective man like H. C. Earwicker. There are any
number of passages in Beckett which bear out this confusion. This is
especially obvious in L'Innommable where the level of awareness is very
close to unconsciousness. The narrator of this volume at one point gives
a catalogue of the inhabitants of Beckett's world (whose names and iden-
tities are readily confused) which is like an antepurgatorial Yoknapa-
tawpha County or Comrdie humaine.
Malone is there . . . I see him from the waist up, he stops at the waist, as
far as I am concerned. The trunk is erect. But I do not know whether he
is on his feet or on his knees. He might also be seated. I see him in profile.
Sometimes I wonder if it is not Molloy. Perhaps it is Molloy, wearing
Malone's hat. But it is more reasonable to suppose it is Malone, wearing
his own hat. Oh look, there is the first thing, Malone's hat. I see no other
clothes. Perhaps Molloy is not here at all. Could he be, without my knowl-
edge? The place is no doubt vast. Dim intermittent lights suggest a kind
of distance. To tell the truth I believe they are all here, at least from
Murphy on, I believe we are all here, but so far I have only seen Malone.
(The Unnamable, pp. 5-6)

Like Dante's Belacqua, a favorite figure of Beckett,2 these creatures

are committed to standing before the gates of Purgatory, occupying a
kind of vacuum which is beyond the narrator's powers to describe.
Belacqua's helplessness is mirrored in the disorientation of a group of
lost souls-all the Molloys and Malones-whose names and identities
cannot be separated.
Another of Beckett's characters, as Jacqueline Hoefer has already
suggested, is oddly obsessed with the problem of names:
And Watt's need of semantic succour was at times so great that he would
set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats.
(Watt, Paris, Olympia Press, 1958, p. 90)

Beckett offhandedly, on one occasion, decides that he had better

give a character whom he has handled nameless through 68 pages some
form of identification:

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 Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman 27

But it's time I gave this solitary a name, nothing doing without proper
names. I therefore baptise him Worm. It was high time. Worm. I don't
like it, but I haven't much choice.
(The Unnamable, p. 69)
And then there are moments when Beckett feels that he must change
the names of his characters:

For Sapo-no, I can't call him that any more, and I even wonder how I
was able to stomach such a name till now. So then for, let me see, for
Macmann ...
(Malone Dies, New York, Grove Press, 1956, p. 55)
and

Decidedly Basil is becoming important, I'll call him Mahood instead, I

prefer that, I'm queer.
(The Unnamable, p. 29)

Names are not, then, as serious a matter for Beckett as they were
for the Victorians. One of the joys in reading Dickens, for example, is
in the bizaare choice of names; each is like a symbolical tag which im-
mediately conjures up a whole series of associations. One cannot imagine
Dickens suggesting midway through a novel that the name of the pro-
tagonist be changed or that some confusion might exist between one
character and another due to the similarity in names. The pride of
authorship dictated to the Victorians that colorful, suggestive names be
an essential part of novel writing.

But, as Nathalie Sarraute has suggested, Beckett is not alone in

his practice. Indeed she derives the tendency from Dostoevsky, Dickens'
contemporary, especially from the Notes from Underground-a work
which she insists is at the root of modern fiction and prepares directly for
Kafka. Dostoevsky's underground man likens himself to an insect, sug-
gests that he should like to become one, and insists at every turn on his
anonymity and grotesqueness.

Beckett's trilogy, like Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, pro-

ceeds through monologue, with the identity of the narrator becoming
increasingly dimmer. The soliloquy changes hands four times: there
are two monologists in Molloy, each telling half of the story; one each
in Malone meurt and L'Innommable. The only one of these narrators
who is entirely aware of events in the outside world is Moran who re-
lates the second half of Molloy. If there were not this sudden reversal
to the waking, to the completely conscious, one could trace an increasing
obliteration of consciousness which almost thoroughly blacks out in the
final pages of L'Innommable.3

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28 Wisconsin Studies

As it is, we find each successive narrator being less and less certain
of names and identities. Even Moran towards the end of his section
starts wondering whether he is not becoming more like Molloy than him-
self. (Several critics have already suggested this curious melting of
Moran into Molloy.) Even though he seems to narrate more lucidly
and coherently than Molloy, one wonders whether much of what he says
is not more fanciful than real.

Certainly the narrators of Malone meurt and L'Innommable are

very far from concrete identity. That is why they juggle names--
changing those already given, inventing new ones. That is why they
seem so unsure of things outside of them which are not within immedi-
ate reach, which cannot be touched. (Deprived as they usually are of the
other faculties, Beckett's characters seem to have an especially refined
and developed sense of touch.) As Malone and the unnamed narrator
ramble on and on disconcertedly, one sees the gradual "dissolution of
self" and the disappearance of an external dimension. Objects like pencil
stubs and umbrellas seem to leap out of space, to desert their settings.
The stick which Malone uses to retrieve "possessions" beyond his reach
is more an extension of his own being than an object which occupies
space.

Beckett has perhaps introduced a new conception of space which

replaces that which Joseph Frank convincingly finds in Ulysses and Mrs.
Dalloway. In the last two parts of Beckett's trilogy, Malone meurt and
L'Innommable, the exterior dimension seems to be entirely denied. We
no longer have objects in space to balance, however precariously, the
thoughts of the characters' minds: the streets and happenings of Dublin
which give a direction to Leopold Bloom's monologue, the chiming of
Big Ben which offers a point of reference for Clarissa Dalloway's soli-
loquy. Malone and the unnamable exist in almost a spatial vacuum,
with nothing outside to balance the meanderings of their minds. Thus
Beckett says in Molloy: "To restore silence is the role of objects."
(p. 16)
What happens to Malone and the unnamable when they are de-
prived of an exterior dimension is the gradual disappearance of their
own personalities, the "dissolution of self." Silence, as much as it is
possible in literature, is finally restored and the narrator is almost totally,
in Joyce's words, refined out of existence. One should not be fooled by
the rhetoric which gushes uncontrolledly from the mouths of Beckett's
monologists; it seems merely to be the literary substitution for silence,
Beckett's equivalent of Mallarm6's blank page.

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 Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman 29

The frantic closing lines of L'Innommable make vivid this need

for silence and the increasing loss of self and identity:
... I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words, as
long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain,
strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have
said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my
story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if
it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll
never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on,
I' go on.
(The Unnamable, p. 179)
This passage is in the tradition of Dostoevsky's Notes from Under-
ground, but it carries this type of literature to a more advanced stage.
Beckett seems to be speaking as much of his own technique as he is of
Proust's when he writes:

The Proustian stasis is contemplative, a pure act of understanding, will-

less, the 'amabilis insania' and the 'holder Wahnsinn.'
(Proust, New York, Grove Press, p. 70)

We have seen then how a type of grotesqueness which has invaded

all of Beckett's characters has resulted in the gradual falling apart of
a literary world so that the usual nuances in name, place, and object
have ceased to function. Malone is really no different from Molloy who
is no different from Mahood; the names and people who own them have
merged. Places are never concretely identified because they are virtually
all the same for Beckett's creatures. A pencil stub for Malone is no dif-
ferent from a sucking stone for Molloy or a rocking chair for Murphy.
All of this seems to be part of Beckett's aesthetic of negation. We
can now more readily agree with Claude Mauriac's remark: "For
Beckett... words all say the same thing."

Claude Mauriac has been very careful to link Beckett with a cer-
tain group of contemporaries, most of whom write in French. In The
New Literature, the only writer considered who uses English exclusively
is Henry Miller-the frequently expatriated American who now lives
in California. Curiously absent are England's Angry Young Men who
are so often linked with new tendencies in the novel.4 Their "anger"
would seem to be a natural companion to the violence and anguish which
appears in the writing of their continental contemporaries. Colin Wil-
son's readings in Dostoevsky, Kafka, Hesse, and Barbusse, which have
given birth to The Outsider and Religion and the Rebel, would seem to
qualify him as the spokesman for aliterature, as the theoretician for the

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30 Wisconsin Studies

"'nouveau roman." Stuart Holroyd's Emergence from Chaos has less

of a literary bias than Wilson's studies but has the same sense of angst.
Novelists like John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, and John
Braine continue turning out fiction filled with social protest.
Yet one feels that Mauriac has shrewdly avoided a discussion of
these writers. Their rejection is of a very different sort from Beckett's
or Kafka's. And most important, they have done very little to change
the traditional shape of the novel. There is not a genuine experimentalist
in their midst. The narrator in Wain's The Contenders, for example, has
a conventional first and last name (Joe Shaw); tells a story which does
not at first directly concern him but eventually involves him as much if
not more than the other participants (a sound Jamesian device); has a
firm grasp of all spatial and temporal matters, never contorting chron-
ology; and never lapses into uncontrolled monologues which have noth-
ing to do with the progress of the action. This is a fairly typical Angry
Young Man novel; it has all the conventional ingredients which one has
come to expect from the most recent English fiction.
It is clear, however, when one crosses the Channel that there is an
attempt being made once again-after Proust, Joyce, and Gide-at
changing the structure of the novel. Beckett seems to have found a
more genial literary climate in his adopted France. His French con-
temporaries, variously referred to as "chosistes" and "l'lcole du Re-
gard," are systematically involved in writing a new type of novel. They
are not rebelling against society in their fiction, like Wain and Amis;
ideas other than literary are of little interest to them. They are rebelling
against the accustomed procedures for constructing a novel.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, in an essay which appeared in Evergreen Re-
view, Vol. 3, No. 9 ("Old 'Values' and the New Novel") argued for a
new sense of space in fiction: "... the complete rejection of the old myths
of profondeur, or depth of meaning in objects." His own four novels,
Les Gommes, La Jalousie, Le Voyeur, and Dans le Labyrinthe, bear
out this curious sense of the importance of objects for their own sur-
face appeal. His narrators catalogue every object in sight, much as
Beckett's characters are fond of listing their "possessions" and describ-
ing them in minute surface detail. These narrators safeguard their
anonymity even more jealously than Beckett's. The person telling the
story in La Jalousie is never identified by name; we know only that he
is the husband of A ... (a naming device peculiar to countesses and
marquises in 18th century French novels). The narrator of Le Voyeur
speaks constantly of Mathias in the third person, but we realize finally
that this is a stylistic trick; indeed all the events are really filtered

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 Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman 31

through Mathias' eyes. This is probably part of the author's attempt

to dupe the reader about the detective story ending. (I am always re-
minded of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.) Beck-
ett's name juggling and his insistence on certain letters of the alphabet
beg comparison with Robbe-Grillet's devices.
Bruce Morrissette in his admirable study of La Jalousie (Ever-
green Review, Vol. 3, No. 10) makes the following point: "Jealousy5
probably contains more repetitions than any other work in the history
of the novel." (p. 185). It develops through a series of tableaux like
Madame Bovary, but unlike Flaubert's novel the same tableaux keep
recurring, with much the same dialogue and description. The circular
structure, it seems to me, can only be rivaled by Faulkner's Absalom,
Absalom!

Beckett's work seems also to thrive on repetition; he has a very

strong sense of circular structure, of returning again and again to the
same idea, to the same literary situation. He begins the second part
of Molloy: "It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows." He
ends it with the same two sentences, adding on the negation of both:
"It was not midnight. It was not raining." Malone meurt and L'Innom-
mable twist and turn repetitively with no advance in the "action" or
appreciable change of any sort. Watt often strikes one as being an
exercise in bombast: words--often the same ones used again and again
--existing for their own sake.
... I mean first an onion, then a peppermint, then
another onion, then another peppermint, then
another onion, then another peppermint, then
another onion, then another peppermint, then
another onion, then another peppermint, then
another onion, then another peppermint, then
another onion, then another peppermint, then
another onion, then another peppermint, and so on...
(Watt, p. 56)

This in its insistent monotony certainly outdoes Gertrude Stein and

even Hemingway's caricature of her method.
Although Robbe-Grillet seems to come closer to Beckett's devices
than any other French contemporary, we should not ignore other at-
tempts to reshape the traditional novel. Nathalie Sarraute in her volume
of criticism L'Jre du SoupCon on the one hand offers an appeal for the
traditional novel:

Et il est bien vrai qu'on ne peut refaire du Joyce ou du Proust, alors qu'on

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32 Wisconsin Studies

refrait chaque jour i la satisfaction g6dnrale du Stendhal ou du Tolstoi.

(p. 94)
but on the other speaks out for the most advanced techniques:

... d'une technique qui parviendrait & plonger le lecteur dans le flot de
ces drames souterrains que Proust n'a eu le temps que de survoler et dont
il n'a observe' et reproduit que les grandes lignes immobiles . . .
(p. 118)

She admires the English novel especially for its dialogue. After passing
lightly over Henry Green and Joyce Cary, she devotes considerable ef-
fort to explaining and praising the "sous-conversation" of Ivy Comp-
ton-Burnett. These "mouvements interieurs" in this English contem-
porary's novels she finds to be the most notable advance fiction has re-
cently made.
As for Nathalie Sarraute's own novels, we find little of the tra-
ditionalism of Stendhal and Tolstoi, but much of the "drame souter-
rain." Like Robbe-Grillet, she seems fond of the modified detective
story--especially in Portrait d'un Inconnu. Sartre has written a famous
preface to this novel in which he calls it "an anti-novel that reads like a
detective story." The book proceeds through the most oblique kind of
character presentation and development. The narrator and two prin-
cipal characters are never referred to by name, not even by a letter of
the alphabet. The plot zigzags in and out of real situations; only towards
the end does one have action in the accepted sense when the unnamed
heroine marries a certain Louis Dumontet. (There is genuine irony
here when Nathalie Sarraute deprives her main characters of names
yet gives a first and last one to a character who does not appear until the
novel is almost finished.) The narrator conveniently disappears be-
hind the action whenever any seems to occur. This is a device which
Beckett is fond of using. Sarraute's novel, however, is more genuinely
steeped in reality than any of Beckett's later novels. And it does not
have the frenzied repetition of a Beckett or a Robbe-Grillet.
"L'Vcole du Regard" has found a critical spokesman in the essays
of Roland Barthes. In a work called Le Degrd zero de l'dcriture he
outlines a type of literature-which excludes almost all previous genera-
tions of French writers but includes a good many of his contemporaries
-often referred to as "blank writing" or "a silence of writing." Beck-
ett clearly falls within the limits of his study as does Robbe-Grillet who
is the subject of one of Barthes' shorter essays.6 Barthes praises the
new sense of literary space. He looks to modern physics and the cinema
as the healthiest analogies for the new type of novel.

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 Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman 33

Beckett's and Robbe-Grillet's French publisher, Les tditions de

Minuit, has introduced another group of novelists, who are not treated
in Mauriac's study. Michel Butor and Claude Simon have the same
feeling for anonymity as the other writers we have spoken of. Butor's
narrator in La Modification keeps referring to himself as "you." He
opens his mind to the reader in good stream-of-consciousness fashion,
without most of the impressionistic liberties which one associates with
the method. The story moves in circular fashion, back and forth in
time, much like Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie, but avoids most of the other
narrative complications of that novel. Claude Simon's work is in the
same tradition, but his devices are if anything more elaborate. Henri
Peyre has accurately spoken of him as "the most genuinely Faulknerian
of the French writers."

One can include in this expanding list of French writers who are
literary kinsmen of Beckett, Claude Ollier for his La Mise en Schne
(published, significantly enough, by Les Editions de Minuit) and Mar-
guerite Duras especially for her Le Square. The latter novel should
particularly delight Nathalie Sarraute since it is written almost en-
tirely in dialogue and captures the introspective intensity of the "sous-
conversation."

This grouping of French writers about Samuel Beckett seems to

offer him a more sympathetic literary climate than any other.' Our
critical judgment of him appears to thrive when we view him in the
larger context of a movement-however loosely organized it may be.
Almost all of the writers we have just mentioned have one decisive
trait in common: they are essayists parading as novelists. Nathalie
Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet, as we have seen, have written literary
criticism as well as novels. In the case of Sarraute one sees literary
judgments of other writers constantly turning up in her fiction: in the
first chapter of her Portrait d'un Inconnu, for example, there are ref-
erences to Julien Green, Frangois Mauriac, and Andre Gide. She is
always fond of bringing up her two favorites, Dostoevsky and Kafka,
whenever the occasion even vaguely presents itself. Roland Barthes
has made his contribution as a critic. Butor and especially Simon are
fond of literary allusions in their novels, and Simon's style usually has a
prolix, essayist quality which we generally associate with literary critics.
Maurice Blanchot, who is often associated with the group, is almost
certainly a more important critic than novelist; his most impressive
volume to date, Faux Pas, is a series of critical pieces. And finally if
one chooses to connect Albert Camus with these writers, as Claude

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 34 Wisconsin Studies

Mauriac has done, we must remember his critical volumes, Le Mythe

de Sisyphe and L'Homme revolte; even when he does write fiction as in
La Chute and La Peste there is much of the essayist about him.
Beckett is in good company here for he too is very much a literary
critic. He began his career with an essay on James Joyce in 1929 and a
monograph on Marcel Proust in 1931. He occasionally reviewed books
for transition during the years it was publishing Joyce's Work in Prog-
ress. These tendencies are carried into his fiction, especially in the long,
non-structural asides which haunt almost all of his novels. Walter
Strauss has already pointed out the numerous references to Dante's
Belacqua. Beckett frequently makes such bizarre allusions as the fol-
lowing:
Two massive upright unupholstered armchairs, similar to those killed under
him by Balzac, made it just possible for them to take their meals seated.
Murphy's rocking-chair trembled by the hearth, facing the window. The
vast floor area was covered all over by a linoleum of exquisite design, a
dim geometry of blue, grey and brown that delighted Murphy because
it called Braque to his mind, and Celia because it delighted Murphy.
(Murphy, New York, Grove Press, p. 63)

He loves to fake titles such as The Pathetic Fallacy from Avercamp to

Kampendonck and delights in putting slightly lewd comments in the
mouths of well known artists:

The decaying Haydn, invited to give his opinion of cohabitation, replied:

"Parallel thirds."
(Murphy, p. 195)
Much of this is literary sport with Beckett. Yet we do come away
from his fiction, and also his plays, convinced that he is widely read and
quite a competent judge of other writers', painters', and musicians'
work. He always has the essayist's tendency of long digressions. It is
almost part of his technique as a novelist to digress at will and allow his
nonsense thoughts to amuse him in the manner of George Moore. Beck-
ett's novels proceed with the unhurried pace of leisurely essays.
And even the somber monologues of the Molloy trilogy have very
much the tone of essay writing, now with a more marked philosophical
bent. Beckett is always intrigued with the difficulty of language and its
semantic problems:
... that's all words they taught me, without making their meaning clear
to me, that's how I learnt to reason, I use them all, all the words they
showed me, there were columns of them, oh the strange glow all of a
sudden, they were on lists, with images opposite, I must have forgotten
them, I must have mixed them up, these nameless images I have, these
imageless names, these windows I should perhaps rather call doors, at

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 Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman 35

least by some other name, and this word man which is perhaps not the
right one for the thing I see when I hear it, but an instant, an hour, and
so on, how can they be represented, a life ... I call that the dark, perhaps
it's azure, blank words, but I use them...
(The Unnamable, pp. 169-170)

This is why it takes Beckett's novels so very long to get anywhere.

Watt, for example, seems to have as long an incubation period emerging
ab ovo as Tristram Shandy. But this must be regarded as essential
a part of Beckett's method as it is of that of his French contemporaries.
We can return for a last time to Mauriac's The New Literature
and agree that Beckett snugly fits into an "experimentalist" tradition
in novel writing and that any peculiarities observable in his fiction are
part of a calculated, disciplined method.

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

1 Other critics have also treated this problem. See, for example, Ihab H.
Hassan's "The Anti-Hero in Modern British and American Fiction," Comparative
Literature, Proceedings of the ICLA Congress in Chapel Hill, N.C., edited by
W. P. Friederich, University of North Carolina Press, 1959. The unsigned "A
Pronoun Too Few," Times Literary Supplement, January 1, 1960, handles the
problem in the novels of Nathalie Sarraute.
2 Belacqua's name appears intermittently through Beckett's novels. His name
is used for the hero of Beckett's short story "Dante and the Lobster." For an
exhaustive and penetrating treatment of the subject, see Walter A. Strauss's
"Dante's Belacqua and Beckett's Tramps," Comparative Literature, XI, 3 (1959),
pp. 250-261.
3 I have treated this briefly in "The Achievement of Samuel Beckett," Books
Abroad, XXXIII, 3 (1959), p. 280.
4 Books Abroad, XXXIII, 3 (1959), pp. 261-270, contains an excellent general
treatment of these writers; see Nona Balakian's "The Flight from Innocence: Eng-
land's Newest Literary Generation." This issue also contains a brief review of
Mauriac's The New Literature; see Anna Balakian's "The New 'Aliterature"'
(p. 284).
5 The translation of La Jalousie as Jealousy (the title in the Grove Press
edition) strikes me as unfortunate. The school of novelists which includes Robbe-
Grillet and Beckett insists on ignoring the emotions. These writers directly
transcribe events and objects through purely surface descriptions. So involved
a feeling as jealousy would never enter into their fictional world. Jalousie or per-
haps Venetian Blind would seem to me a more revealing English title. In a sense
Robbe-Grillet's narrators look at objects and events through the distorted and
unsure optics of one looking through a venetian blind or a partially opened win-
dow. Furthermore, the word "jalousie" turns up several times in the original text,
each time with the meaning of venetian blind or its near equivalent.
6 A translation of the essay appears as "Alain Robbe-Grillet," Evergreen Re-
view, II, 5 (1958), pp. 113-126.

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 36 Wisconsin Studies

7 Germaine Br6e and Margaret Guiton in their An Age of Fiction consider

Beckett along with Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor. Henri Peyre treats Beckett
briefly in the appendix to his The Contemporary French Novel. Olivier de Magny
in his "Panaroma d'une nouvelle litterature romanesque," Esprit, Nos. 7-8,
(1958), pp. 3-53, classifies Beckett with the French. Maurice Blanchot in the
recent collection of essays Le Livre & Venir places Beckett with Jean Genet and
Lautr'amont in their approach towards a "parole neutre." As far as I know,
Kenneth Allsop's The Angry Decade, alone among the comparative studies, places
Beckett among England's Angry Young Men.
(Originally a lecture delivered before the Wisconsin Language and Literature
Club)

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