Arthur E. Babcock
The New Novel in France: Theory and Practice of the Nouveau Roman
New York: Twayne Publ., 1997. Pp. 162. $34.95
Reviewed by Raylene Ramsay

This is a very readable overview and thoughtful critical analysis of the French “New Novel” some forty years after the special issue of L’Esprit on the nouveau roman (1958) launched the academy’s interest in a new literary phe­nomenon. Babcock’s study in Twayne’s Critical History of the Novel series recapitulates the innovations that make it still possible to link the names of Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Butor, Simon, and Duras.

These writers were brought together momentarily in the 1950s around the Editions de Minuit through their defiance of readers’ expectations and interest in creating new forms better adapted to a modern world. The paths they took, concedes Babcock, were very different. Robbe-Grillet’s theory speaks of defamiliarizing hard surfaces, of challenging the old myths of depth and the intelligibility of man and world; his work is composed of external stills. Nathalie Sarraute is concerned with the exploration of emotional stirrings, a stream of internal move­ments where nothing remains of the convenient surface landmarks with which a traditional reader constructs characters. What does emerge as common is the general movement in the late 1960s from a phenomenological interest in the relationship between consciousness and the world (Robbe-Grillet) or in a new and more profound psychological realism (Sarraute) to the structuralist phase of a concern with language as a relational system and with the practices of writing.

It is perhaps in the nature of literary histories that the works included are those which have attained the greatest notoriety, have the most substantial read­ership, and are still in print. Babcock justifies his inclusion of Michel Butor on the grounds of that writer’s theoretical essays, attempts to unite philosophy, poetry, and literary criticism, and eclectic use of different narratives-history, journalism, educational writing, casual conversations-that make up a cultural mythology. Butor’s experimentation with the many technical possibilities available to fiction, his new mobile forms exemplify the later developments in the avant-garde movement.

It is Claude Simon’s thematics of uncertainty and disintegration that Babcock selects to justify that writer’s inclusion-the doomed attempt to make sense of an always ambivalent experience (“how can you tell?”) in a world “crumbling collapsing gradually disintegrating in fragments like an abandoned building, unusable, left to the incoherent, casual, impersonal, and destructive work of time” (La Route des Flandres 231). In a second phase, however, it is Simon’s questioning of representation, of the relationship between language and the real, as lived scenes freeze to representations that allow him to exemplify the (New) New Novel. Duras’s feminine thematics of desire, absence, silence, and forgetting are noted as distinctive. Her destruction of the language forms in power and the examination of the creation of the self through its ‘fictioning’ arguably give her membership.

Despite these well-argued cases, Babcock’s selection and omission of writers is at least in part a function of the present and of the readership of the Twayne’s series. The politics of the literary marketplace and the need to construct an orderly work are also surely behind the systematic use of English for titles and quotations and the selection of works discussed-two for each author, one representing the phenomenological anti-novel of the 1960s and the other standing for the structuralist novel of the later period (except in the case of Duras, where the best-seller L’Amant of the autofictional period is preferred to the difficult works of the 1970s).

Babcock’s interestingly nuanced conclusion situates the shared historical relativism, the internal focalization that corresponds to the need to recover a collapsed order on an individual level, and the interest in the functioning of the creative consciousness present in the earlier phase of the New Novel within modernism. The later focus on representation and the revisiting of “used-up” forms is seen as possibly postmodern but in the event that the New Novel is cohesive-a movement rather than a move-it would fall, he argues, outside the multiplicity of heterogeneous techniques that mark the postmodern.

This study demonstrates both the heterogeneity of the work of the individual writers presented and the ideological/aesthetic preoccupations common to an era-the paradoxical existence of a movement that, as Babcock himself admits, paraphrasing Luce Irigaray, “wasn’t one.” It has the merit of being clear and accessible to students without over-simplification despite one or two minor errors of fact (“the girl in the Lover has two brothers whereas Duras has only one,” 125). Had Babcock continued to examine the transition of the New Novel to New Autobiography in the last two decades, this would have strengthened his conclusions on the reluctance of the New Novelists to accept a postmodern ethos of language all alone and on the possibility in a self-fictioning of the sliding into language of something lived.