[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
Some people say that everyone's entitled to an opinion, but here on entitled opinions, we think differently.
We think that you have to earn your entitlement to an opinion unless, of course, you're the host of the show,
in which case it's your listeners who are entitled to your opinions.
That's right friends, you are all entitled to my opinions and to those of my guests.
You've earned that privilege by being resourceful and open-minded enough to tune into this show in the first place.
If you listen to entitled opinions on a regular basis, you're automatically granted a title.
Baron, Marquis, Contessa, Dukessa, take your pick.
We're not picky around here, we're not bashful either, and we're certainly not miserly.
In fact, we're exceedingly generous when it comes to dispensing our opinions.
At the granting you all, you're distinguished titles to them.
So, is everyone in? Is everybody in? This conversation is about to begin.
[Music]
Looks so good, it looks so cool. You plant your lips in tooth or pulpit. Don't give him, and don't be a fool.
I'll tell you about that water is cool.
That voice you hear singing is well known to the entitled opinions brigade by now.
It's the voice of Christy Wampold, the lead singer of the band Glass Wave, and also production manager of entitled opinions last year.
And guests who joins me in the studio today for a conversation about literature.
That's right, our own. Christy Wampold, so stay tuned.
[Music]
Christy gave up her job as production manager of entitled opinions in order to focus her energies this year on
completing her dissertation on essayistic fiction in post-war French and Italian literature.
And that brilliant dissertation is just about finished now.
So, it's my special privilege and pleasure to invite her on the show today to share with us her
eminently entitled opinions about post-war French fiction.
And in particular about the Nuvojo Ma, or the so-called new novelists of the 50s and 60s and 70s,
that would include names like Nataly Sarot, Michel Boudot, and then Rob Clier, Marguerite du Rast, Claude Cemore and others.
Before soliciting Christy's thoughts on this August group of writers, let me stay for the record that I don't feel particularly entitled to an opinion about them,
since I have only a partial acquaintance with their corpus.
And that's due in part to the fact that their novels sometimes leave me cold, leave me wondering, "A quabble."
Yet I have to say that I am fond and very interested in their programmatic ideas for a new kind of novel.
Who can argue with them these new novelists at a new era calls for a new novel?
That seems intuitively right.
And it is true that the post-war era dominated by science, mass society, and runaway technologies is new.
It's also true that Auschwitz and the atom bomb have exploded our earlier assumptions about what it means to be human.
Again, it seems intuitively right to insist that the novel, if it hopes to belong to its time, must detraditionalize its genre, discard the old conventions,
and discover new ones that are no longer bound to the dictates of realism, omniscience, and the unity of meaning.
The problem for me lies in the pudding, as it were.
By that I mean that while I find these writers very interesting when they spell out their ideas for a new kind of novel, I have to be persuaded yet that their practice redeems their theory.
But I'm easy to persuade and maybe by the end of the hour my guest, Christy Wampol, will convince me that the new novel is one of the landmark events in 20th century fiction.
We'll see in the meantime, let me welcome Christy to the show.
Welcome to a title of pinions, Christy, on this side of the mic.
Thank you, Robert.
I don't know where you'd like to begin, but I'm just going to begin with a straightforward question about what is the new novel and what can you tell us about it to put in some kind of context.
Well, as you mentioned that the new novel was came about between the 1950s and lasted roughly through the 1970s.
It was by no means a cohesive movement and some figures, some of the protagonists are quite loosely related.
You'd mention Magarit de Ross, for example, a large part of her literary production actually could not be identified specifically as having characteristics of the new novel.
Anna Hope Grea and Nataly Salut were the sort of main theorists of the movement as well as Jean-Hégal du much later.
So this new novel was a reaction against several things.
First of all, it was a reaction against a certain kind of 19th century bourgeois realism that had tended to dominate the French novel since that period.
So they wanted to create a new kind of realism.
They weren't opposed to realism altogether, but they were opposed to the kind represented by writers such as Bazzack, which for them embodied this certain, certain bourgeois, very heavily bourgeois values.
They were also opposed to Lita Cholngage, in other words, engaged literature that has a political motivation.
They believed very much in a kind of renewal of the La Poulard that the Palmasian had proposed art for art sake.
So it was a renewal of this kind of art for art sake.
So I thought maybe to give you a good example of what the new role moment tries to do that I would read and excerpt first and then talk about the features of that specific excerpt.
This is from a collection of short stories, if they can be called as such, called Snapshots, that's the English title and French, it's enstultaine by Höb Kriyie.
This first example, it's called the Dressmaker's Dummy.
I'll just read a short example to give you a sense of what the new role moment feel is.
The coffee pot is on the table.
It is a four-legged round table covered with a waxy oil cloth, patterned in red and gray squares against a neutral background of yellowish white, that may have been formerly ivory colored or white.
In the center, a square ceramic tile serves as a protective base.
Its design is entirely hidden, or at least made unrecognizable by the coffee pot placed upon it.
The coffee pot is made of brown earthenware.
It consists of a sphere topped by a cylindrical filter holder with a mushroom-shaped lid.
The spout is an s, with flattened curves widening out slightly at the base.
The handle has perhaps the shape of an ear, or rather of the outer fold of an ear.
It would be a misshapen ear to circular and lacking a lobe, which would thus resemble a picture handle.
The spout, the handle and the mushroom lid are of a creamy color.
The rest is of a very light, smooth brown and shiny.
There is nothing on the table except the waxy table cloth, the ceramic base and the coffee pot.
The design on the ceramic tile base is the picture of an owl with two large, somewhat frightening eyes, but for the moment it cannot be made out because of the coffee pot.
Okay, so what's going on here?
Sounds like still life in a verbal medium to me.
Exactly.
What they were trying to do, they were very disappointed at the centrality of the human in fiction, the centrality of the individual, and the complete dominance in 19th century, realist fiction of the individual.
They wanted to create a non-antropecentric model in their writing.
And so from the description that I just gave, it's obvious that there's a perceiver, someone's perceiving these objects.
However, the person's thoughts about these objects, their conclusions about them, are not central to this narrative at all.
For example, they were interested in emphasizing objects and gestures, not psychology, not human emotion.
Or human interiority, I guess.
Exactly.
In fact, their work has been described as a sort of exterior monologue, which is an interesting turn, rather than an interior monologue and exterior monologue, so it's this direct human engagement with the world itself.
What was the basis of their desire to repudiate the psychological novel or to create a kind of, to get beyond the traditional interiority of a character, the character, who sees the world through a subjectivity.
And to why did they believe that psychology had become something that, if it's not putting it too strongly, obsolete in the new era.
And that therefore the novel had to find a different foundation to build on than that of the psychological individual protagonist.
Well, I think they found that the psychological novel was completely limiting in many senses, and I think they would agree with Milan Kundera, who believes that any novel should make the form of the novel itself progress forward in some way.
And to keep repeating this 19th century model over and over for them was a limitation of human creativity.
And they always cast the problem in terms of freedom that somehow by focusing so much on the individual and one individual's psychology through the author, where the author has complete power over what you are allowed to see and what the kinds of conclusions you're allowed to make.
That this was very limiting for the reader.
So I think it's a kind of re-valorization of the reader.
I understand that. That's part of the theory that appeals to me in theory again that the writer almost writes himself or herself out of the text and invites the reader into it in order to be kind of a co-writer of the meaning or the perceptions or what have you.
But again, there's this question that comes to my mind when you mention Milan Kundera that the novel has to keep progressing.
It might be misleading to think of a progression of the novel because it sounds like it has a teleology and it's always going forward.
For Kundera, if I read them correctly, the novel can do something that no other medium can do quite as well.
And that is to retrieve the density of what he called the life world, the Laban spell.
Yes.
And therefore it has this phenomenological, it's a native homeland of a certain kind of phenomenology of what it means to be in the world as a human being and to transcribe the lived experience in the novel for.
So are the new novelists giving up on that vocation of making the novel the place where a lived experience is registered?
Or are they on the contrary trying to actually do a better job of it by paying this close attention to the superficial external details of our perception?
I would say it's the latter and Rob Kriyay has been accused by several critics of being anti-humanist.
He always responds in a very upset way to these accusations and he claims that he is in fact perhaps more humanist in many ways than his accusers.
Because in fact he's placing the centrality on human perception in a very real way, not in a fictional way, because a reader is engaging directly with this book and you have this complete human subjectivity that is practiced and executed through this kind of fiction.
And the role that objects play for the new-ville homo is crucial obviously because the exterior monologue is really, the still life quality of what you read would seem to draw attention to the density and inexhaustibility of the phenomenological givenness of things to our perception.
Can you say something more about the role that objects in the new vodola?
Yes, I think description plays a completely different role for the new vodola mostly than it did for the early 19th century models that I mentioned.
Rob Kriyay describes these earlier models as having the role of describing a pre-existing world.
So it's a fictional world perhaps based on the real world but it is pre-existing before the text itself exists.
So for example in Balsak, if you have Balsak describing the physical characteristics of a person describing a room, a street scene, that the reader always has the impression that these scenes pre-existed the book.
And if you recall the example that I just read aloud, you have a sense that the description plays a creative role because it's being created before your eyes.
One has the impression that he's not describing something that pre-exists but it's the text itself that's making it exist.
And what's the, I don't like the metaphor, William James became famous for but the cash value of that as a reader.
According to the theory is that the experience of reading such a literary work is true to the lived experience of our relationship to objects and to the world of perception.
But it still seems to presuppose that this kind of inward subjectivity is something that history has kind of rendered a little bit marginal if not obsolete in our age.
Well, I'm not sure that it's completely obsolete. I think they felt that it need to be refreshed perhaps and that the only reason that it has, that it had come to seem obsolete was that it had been used in a very strict, formulaic way for so long.
And so it's a question of reevaluating the ways in which we engage with objects in the world and allowing the reader to participate in this creative process and to see it as something I always feel in these instances of description in the Newville whole mall that there's a dynamism, a certain dynamism and a certain creative force that's actually taking place, which is my favorite aspect I think of these novels.
When it comes to this intense focus on objects in the novel, there is an antecedent, I don't know if it's an antecedent, but at least something contemporary in the French poet, Francie Spong, whose poetry is famously object oriented.
Was he a collaborator with them or was he an inspiration for some of these writers?
Some critics have noticed a genealogy between the treatment of the object between Pong and the Newville whole mall seat, although there's little evidence of a direct influence.
But I did bring Francie Spong, who is actually my favorite French poet, wrote a collection of poems and prose, poem, if you want to call them, as such, called "Le Palti Priti De Shoe," which is translated in English as "Siding in the
Things."
And let me give you an example. This collection was published in 1942. This particular poem is perhaps the most famous, it's called "The Oyster,
Rit."
"The Oyster" is about as large as a medium-sized pebble, but rougher looking, unless uniform and color brilliantly whitish. An obstinately closed world, which, however, can be opened.
Grasp it in the hollow of a dishcloth, use a chipped, not too sharp knife, then give it a few tries.
Some fingers cut themselves on it, and break their nails, crude work. Blows markets on lope with white circles, sorts of halos.
Inside a whole world, both food and drink, under a firmament, strictly speaking, of mother of pearl, the heavens above sinking onto the heavens below form a mere puddle, a viscous greenish sack,
with a blackish lace that ebbs and flows in your eyes and nostrils. Sometimes the rarely, a formula pearls from its nacriest throat, which is immediately used as a personal adornment.
So, as you can see in the example with Pong, it's full of metaphors, and the human is very present. The human is an actor in the opening of the oyster.
However, I feel that the New World Homulsié must have taken some inspiration from Pong, because the object is central and described in an intemptively objective way.
Although the New World Homulsié claim that pure objectivity is a fiction and an impossibility, they aim actually for pure subjectivity through the reader as an active figure.
I know that Natalyse Saro wrote eloquently about the theory of the New Novel, as well as Hom Priya and others claim that Camus litongié, the stranger, that novel of Arbir Camus was very important inspiration for them, because it was the precursor of a novel that put all the emphasis on things and external environment.
So, it's the sun, it's the sea, it's the new hour. You don't get this kind of interiority of the main character. You can't really penetrate his motivations or obscure. It seems that the agency of action comes from outside and not from inside.
Exactly. They were highly influenced by this book, as well as Natalyse by Salf. Interestingly, they were opposed to Salf, his statements in Kescolale Tchaot, about the Littaturangaje, which we could talk about.
In a moment. But Camus Littaturangié was completely influential in the formation of the theory of the New Vohomo, I believe.
Yes, this exteriority, where you never get a real sense who Melso is, there's no interior monologue. Again, it's this exterior monologue, where we hear what he actually says aloud.
And we watch his behavior in the context of the loss of his mother, for example, in the beginning of the story, the way the environment plays a role on him and his actions.
Yeah, I find a number of suspicions I can try them out on you a bit later.
La Nozé is a different kind of novel than the Tchaotangié, and I understand why they responded to La Nozé because there you do have an interior monologue, but it's a monologue of a hook on Thann, who is completely defeated as a traditional human subject by the sheer excess of the existence of things.
That's what nausea means for a hook on Thann, the bewildering cognizance of the sheer gratuitous existence of these things.
And the thingness of these things just overwhelms and horrifies him.
So it's almost like the testament of the traditional subject being overcome and defeated by the externality.
So in that sense, I can see why they saw in La Nozé some kind of important source text for themselves.
Exactly. It's very much about this phenomenological encounter with the world, and it's true that La Nozé and La Chaudet are very different kinds of books, and they accomplish different things.
But this problem of the modern individual faced with the world and the focus on the problem of responding to this world.
The other writers that they, at least some of them, claimed were important for them at the beginning, at least were some of the American novelists with the naive sort of added, let's say the Hemingway type of short sentences.
Characters who don't have a lot of depth, everything kind of happens outside, not inside.
And I'm wondering if there's not some way in which the movies were the model for the New Vohomo writers in the sense that in the, there's a certain style of film where you have characters whose interiority is not probed.
But first, because of medium, unless you have this kind of artificial sounding voiceover, you don't know what's going on inside.
And the French, some of the French filmmakers were brilliant at just creating these masks and the viewers, just see the, they have to go through the perception what's on the screen, the objects have to become eloquent.
Because the human subject is more of a silent. And then, you know, in the American movie tradition, you have the, you know, the silent, strong type, you know, the, the sheriff or the outlaw or the, so that, maybe we can talk about the, the, the, the actual creative work, some of these authors did in film and in a moment.
But before we turn to that topic, I'd let me read you this statement from hope, yeah, that kind of summarizes what we've been talking about so far where he says that the novel of characters belongs entirely to the past, it describes a period, and that which marked the apogee of the individual.
Perhaps this is not an advance, but it is evident that the present period is rather one of administrative numbers. The world's destiny has ceased for us to be identified with the rise or fall of certain men or of certain families.
And Natalie Sarot writes in this vein, modern man, overwhelmed by mechanical civilization is reduced to the triple determinism of hunger, sexuality, and social status or Freud, Marx, and Pavlov, which is clearly in the wrong order to be Marx, Freud, and Pavlov.
And so therefore she too rejects the idea of human depth and she quotes, she, she says I quote, the deep uncovered by post analyses have proved to be nothing but a surface.
Exactly.
They believe that this kind of objectivity is a complete fiction and that the human subject, what a novel is can provide in terms of the depth of a character is, is in a sense a ready-made signification.
So the authors in complete control trying to portray these human emotions or psychologizing a given figure, but that the human ultimately remains impenetrable.
And so these attempts to reach some kind of psychological depth would be in vain ultimately.
Well, do you think that does have something to do with the medium of film and that was the was this other medium very important for their preconception of the novel?
Because it sounds to me like they're trying to catch up with things that have already taken place in the arts and in cinema.
I mean talk about still life or talk about things in cubism, this whole even impressionism earlier than that this this whole drive in the visual arts to see the world, the perceptual world in a more intense way by deregulating the normal habits of perception and therefore pointy leaves more cubism or surrealism.
But even impressionism and expressionism, it seems like these visual artists were there before the new novelists and certainly maybe even the movies as well.
I think the new whole mostly completely believed that the novel was lagging behind and Robca Yey himself who made many films believe that ultimately film would permit an even higher level of experimentation because it is it provides the possibility to act upon two senses at once.
So the vision and hearing and he plays with both in very creative ways in his films, Lenny Del Nia, Maian Bad, which actually to me if you look at still shots, it looks like DeCirico paintings.
I've always felt that way about especially the garden scenes it's very geometrical and has kind of mysterious figures you aren't sure their trajectories who they are their identities are ultimately.
A mystery.
Ira Shimomu wa mua by Magareid Daras is another example of a film that could be qualified as part of the new role, a aesthetic.
And I brought along today a piece of the score from the Alejandro Nes movie that he made with Magareid Daras.
Perhaps we can have a listen.
The movie, yes.
Which should be relatively well known to most of our listeners I suppose more than the Magareid Bad one I suppose.
Yes, I'm definitely.
Okay, here we go.
[Music]
So the reason I brought the song, I believe it embodies very much the spirit of the
Nubahomu, the mood to use Zepgumraeg's term.
[Music]
I believe that the Nubahomu always has a certain feel and is instantly recognizable and
probably it's been described as clinical.
You said in your monologue that the Nubahomu has left you cold.
Yes.
So there's a certain coldness and a feeling of almost of the Nubahomu police, the detective story,
even when the topic of a particular piece has nothing to do with a murder or some kind of mystery story.
So I think this is completely central and has always been somewhat problematic for me in wondering why
when the human is taken out of the center and replaced by a world full of objects and gestures,
why is the ultimate feeling for the reader one of a clinical coldness?
You want me to take a stab at an answer to that?
I'm wondering what your position is on this because I've never been able to figure out why when the human is removed
that suddenly the world feels very much like a scene from a murder mystery.
I mean, the broadest answer I can give to that is that I think that we have to first ask a question of what is the psychology of a reader of novels?
What is it that will make it worthwhile for a reader spend several hours of his or her life reading a novel?
And what investment is there? What is the reader looking for when they open a book like that?
And I think that when they're looking for something different than they're looking for when they're listening to a piece of music,
or when they're looking at an artwork or going to a movie.
And I think that what precisely it's the human interiority and intimacy with a character fictional or otherwise,
where the reverberation of events that happen to an individual are registered somehow in their subjectivity.
And I think if you are going to write a novel about the perceptual world that a kind of neutral subject sees,
there's not that direct investment on the reader's part from my point of view to find that particularly interesting,
because I think other media can do that much better.
And that one turns to novels for a different kind of intimacy.
And I think it's an intimacy that, again, this is my point of view, I don't think it can dispense with the human subject as a subject that feels,
that feels not only perceives.
Would you say that you prefer the films made by Nuva Ramasi to the Nuva Ramasi itself?
I would say, yes, I think that the films work better first because you can get through them in an hour and a half or two.
And then, you know, Satsufi for me.
And because you understand that there's something there in the visual, it's the way in which the frames can be conjoined,
which might be disjunctive, but somehow when the writer tries to imitate what the film editor does by creating these frames and putting them together in a way that's sometimes temporarily displaced or disjunctive,
I don't think it works as well as in the verbal fictional medium as it does in the cinematic medium.
And I think that a face, if it's well chosen in a movie, can be very expressive in its gestures and just in its being there,
and that the writer's self-conscious attempt to describe verbally that same face or those same gestures,
I think it doesn't. On its own, it seems to be lacking something.
There is a problem, I think, of textual efficacy in a way because when you're trying to describe something in a text, you are obviously required to take more time.
And so the temporal relationship with the book is completely different than that of the film in one image of Lani D'Aligna Amayen-Bud, for example,
you're able to convey what would take several pages to describe.
There's a certain immediacy with the films that isn't present with the novels.
Right. And this attempt also to get language to almost speak silently in the novel, that's part of the paradox,
if that's what it's aspiring to have the author write himself or herself out of it and invite the reader in to be the kind of organizing center of this perception mediated by the word,
word. In theory, that sounds great. I'm all for this kind of phenomenological, this restoration of the phenomenological density of our lived experience.
But I have to say that when I open a novel, I myself am looking for something a little bit different. I'm looking for something that has to do with human motivation.
Now, I know that they're interested in human motivation. They experiment by leaving motivation and mood very ambiguous and indeterminate,
and they engage in these techniques of repetition, constant repetition with little minor displacements in the cycles of repetition,
so that you think that you know what a character's motivation is when you find out that it gets modified every time there's a new repetition.
And, okay, fine, you get to the point where you say, "Well, yes, human motivation is mysterious, and I don't understand this character's motivation."
But whether that satisfies me as a reader, I'm not sure.
I have a sense that one of the main reasons that the Newville Hall Mall hasn't necessarily had lasting successes,
I think a general human in comfortability with the indeterminate.
So, we don't necessarily want all of the answers provided, but we might want answers provided when we engage with a text written by a person,
so the fact that an author seems to completely disappear and present a world that is engageable with the reader's subjectivity.
This creates a completely different sense of the way humans engage with the world.
And, you know, this problem, what I mentioned earlier that the Newville Hall Mall CA were interested in creating a new kind of realism.
They were interested in trying to portray human perception.
If you think about the way that the human mind deals with time, for example, the Newville Hall Mall CA deal with time in an interesting way,
you mentioned this problem of repetition.
Human memory is never chronological.
This is something that they also try to assert in their novels.
If you think of La Jalous-Ze, for example, by Rob Craye, which already the title is ambiguous, because La Jalous-Ze can mean either jealousy or La Jalous-Ze is also these shutters through which one would believe is the protagonist,
is looking through constantly throughout the novel.
In La Jalous-Ze, you have a repetition of events. The chronology is unclear. The flow of time is seemingly distorted.
There are moments that are, even if you think about the way objects are described instantly when you're in descriptive passage, there's an automatic slowing down of time.
When there's a dialogic moment where you're hearing pieces of conversation, this seems to be in real time, because it's recording instantly what the two are saying.
You have this back and forth flow of time, and this person who's repeatedly looking out the window down at this woman that could not be his wife, his partner,
who may or may not be cheating on him, it completely ambiguous, including all the perception, problems, the perceptions of time and even space.
Yeah, but, Chrissy, I'm going to go back to this notion of mind that the reason that people read novels is because time takes on a different configuration in a novel than it does in one's lived experience.
And here I'm thinking also a really excellent book by Frank Kermo, who published a few decades ago, called The Sense of an Ending.
And he makes this point, as a human being is born always with a before that proceeded his birth, and then after that's going to continue after his or her death.
And we live in a meantime temporality, which doesn't have a beginning, a middle-earned end.
And the reason we need stories or narratives is because it's a form of organizing time or the experience of time or the meaningfulness of time through a narrativeization that doesn't really correspond to our lived experience.
And that's why there have been stories, stories have been a part of human cultures all throughout history and prehistory and in every part of the world.
If I want to come up with a description of an ordinary, the temporal nature of my perception of objects, I don't need to do that in a novel form.
I've been some other verbal for doing psychology. I can do it as a phenomenologist as a philosopher, but the imperative to organize temporal events in a meaningful pattern so that there is a principle of consequenceality so that the end seems like an inevitable or what Aristotle called a probable outcome of all the events that preceded it so that whatever is included in a narrative has its reason for being there and that if you could subtract it without, you know, a meaningful pattern, you know, a meaningful pattern.
Without, you know, affecting the hold and it has no business being in there in the first place. So does that make me like a conservative reader? Maybe.
But I think the need for a narrative organization of time is rooted in our very humanity.
I think Holbree, you would completely disagree with you.
And he has a very interesting statement that I think is interesting in the context of the early 1950s. He said that the world is neither significant nor absurd.
It is quite simply.
So in early 20th century French literature, you have this absurdist movement, the end not French specifically, but definitely this, the problem of absurdity asserted itself.
In the French literary scene in the early 20th century. But he says that this is a value judgment instantly that there's not a significance. There's not an absurdity that the world just is.
And that what the Newville, Homulsi, I want to do is provide what he calls fragments of crude reality.
So for him in a way, it's a kind of mimetic practice because it's an imitation of the crude reality of the world.
So I don't think he believes in this kind of engagement that you mentioned that as the novelist as an organizer of time as an organizer of experience.
I understand that, but again, there's a scientific drive to some of these a new novelist's where they feel that the novel has to become more scientific in terms of describing, as you say, these kind of fragments, crude fragments of the way they're experientially perceived by the subject.
But how can I put this, the mimetic ambition, or to be more truthful to the actual experience of something by giving it a more enhanced imitation in the novel, is again, using the novel as a place where a much more articulated rendition of human experiences is manifested.
But it still doesn't resolve for me the question of what is the reader's investment when he or she opens a novel.
And I certainly understand why experimentation and innovation and all the reasons that the new novelist gives for needing to renew the novel and to discard the weight of the tradition.
I'm all for that in theory, I just don't know if in practice the kind of coldness that is offered up on the plate.
So these books is something that is a satisfying meal for someone who might be all for a new novel, "Crazine," but that can't still be warm.
Does it have to be cold if it's new, "Ved?"
Exactly. I have to admit that I have always had this problem as well with the text by the new voromo sie.
For example, "La Rout de flonde" by Claude Simo, I found almost impossible to read.
And Simo ended up actually winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985.
He was very involved with the new voromo sie of "Rob gríez," novels.
I like "La Rout de la Rout de la Rout," because it does create a sense of mystery that if you're open to a mystery, it can offer a certain kind of pleasure as you realize that you are the creator of meaning, that you're being presented with these crude fragments of reality and that you're very much an actor within the text.
Would you call the "Nouvo homo nista" avant-gardeous?
I think I would call them avant-galad in the sense that they were trying to move the novel into a new direction and their experiments were imitated later by others in both film and the novel.
So yes, I think they are in the literal sense of avant-galad that they were the first to make this kind of movement.
But again, many of the principles, this idea of a different kind of realism, if you think of Virginia Woolf, for example, in her stream of consciousness experiments, the new voromo sie are taking up again this problem of the flow of consciousness and the representation of the flow of consciousness within a textual space.
So every single point of the novel homo is not completely innovative, no, but I think that they are avant-galad by definition.
In the meantime, Chris, you've written a dissertation not about the "Nouvo homo" or this kind of experimental fiction, but about essayistic fiction, which is a very different genre, as I understand it than the "Nouvo homo" in which
you claim that these completely different set of writers who are expanding the horizons of the novel by either incorporating whole essayistic dimensions into it, or you can look at it the other way around being essayists who are incorporating a novelistic element into the genre of the essay that there's something more radical going on in other sectors of this novel.
It's a post-war period in French letters.
Exactly, but what is problematic in my project specifically is that your brother Thomas Harrison, who's written a book on essays, makes this claim along with Milan Kundera that the essayistic novel is actually a development in the essay, not in the novel.
It's the essay's next progression. For this reason, my work, of course, I take into account the literary panorama of the 20th century, the kinds of writing that was influencing the late 20th century essayistic fiction writers, but that ultimately this is a progression in a different form.
The fact that it takes place in a novel is of less importance than the evolution of a different literary genre, which is the essay.
So, I think the essayistic novelists are engaged in a certain kind of experimental practice that's very different than that of the "Nouvo homo"
who had a completely different agenda as far as which aspects of the novel they're trying to innovate. For example, the essayistic novelists were not interested in the problems of formal experimentation.
They weren't interested in the problem of the, how should I put this? They were interested in the problem of the human in the world, but they approached it from a completely different perspective.
They were completely centered on the individual because the essayist is the ultimate individual in a sense.
So, every human experience is filtered through this human encounter with the world and its objects and gestures.
You remember a few weeks ago we did a show here on Roberto Bolanio and by Nighting Chile and I had a little thing there about the novels that think, and how not very many novels think these days.
The essayistic novel, the way you describe it, it sounds to me like it is a kind of novel that not only invites you to think but almost obliges you to think.
The Bolan, you know, I claimed in a completely different way, a blackie's agree.
Do you think this kind of radical experimentation with a novel of perception that wants to
arrive at pure perception in the Nouveau-hommeau; that even if it's wildly successful
in achieving its ambition of becoming pure perception is thought something that
is a necessary correlate of that, or can you actually read or would thinking in the
rasculosinative sense of the term, get in the way of a proper reading of a new novel?
In a sensibly philosophical thinking would get in the way because this doesn't seem to
be their interest at all, which would differ highly from the essayistic fiction about
which I write, you mentioned this term, the novels that think.
Melan Kondara used that very expression to describe Robert Muziede's The Man Without Qualities,
for example, Helmand books, the sleepwalkers.
These books are very heavily invested in the processes of human experience, the processes
of human thought which can be digressive, very contingent, ten-tacular, that the Nouveau-hommeau
on the other hand, the kind of thinking that it asks you to do has more to do with a
direct engagement with objects without human reflection necessarily.
The way that we engage with objects is very much a sort of more pure distilled experience,
and you mentioned earlier this problem of phenomenology, I think that that was sort of the
core of their practice from the beginning.
The other thing I would add to that is the role that thinking plays in perception.
You can say that that's a hard one that perception doesn't necessarily require certain kind
of philosophical thinking.
We should also ask a question of what thinking has to do with suffering, and this is why
I'm going to come back now to this other question of the investment of the reader in an
the interview, because I find that there's often times it's in order to enter into the
passion of a character or the suffering.
Pinandello has a statement that no one thinks more persistently than when he or she has suffered,
especially in justice, and you're trying to figure out why did this happen?
If the protest against the injustice or you try to work out the reasons for something
happening, but it's deeply connected to pain.
And therefore this was his response to people who thought he was too cerebral, his characters
are too, they kind of go off on these philosophical tangents.
But leaving that aside, do you sense that there is in the new novel, is there any interest
in this irreducible phenomenon of human suffering?
Strangely, I think not at all.
Maybe in a sense one could accuse them of being escapists, of trying to find a way to get
away from human pain, to remove the psychological, through these psychological explorations
that attempt to get at the core of what causes human joy, human suffering.
They seem to skirt this question altogether and to replace it with what they describe
as a more pure engagement with humans and objects, rather than humans and humans.
That's another problem.
When humans engage with objects, perhaps pain is a less likely scenario.
Humans and humans, of course, I think pain is inevitable in those encounters.
Almost, almost in a, yeah, almost a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, well listen, I, I, uh, since we're
coming to the end of our hour, I, I just want to make it clear that in theory, I, I'm
completely with the, the new novelists who say that it's really impossible in our day and
age to keep on writing in the conventional style of, you know, the, the novel of, of the
bourgeois domestic fiction, the space on character and the ordinary.
And this is what, frankly, I've, I've gone on record saying this before on, on this show
that there's a certain kind of American novel of the post-war period that I just find
completely impotent for my purposes.
And it's the, I'll go ahead and name names again.
Yeah, John Uptike Philip Roth, all the, you know, Michael Cunningham, there's a way in which
the American post-war novel has not felt it necessary to make any sort of fundamental adjustment
to the genre itself.
And this is why Susan Sontag, who was one of the champions of the new novelists in the
seventies when she was writing about it, she also denounced, I'm a denounce.
She lamented the fact that the American novelists didn't feel any pressure to change the
basic conventions of storytelling, whereas at least these people over there in Paris and
France were, were more attuned with the times.
And that I agree with, but I, I'm not sure that this kind of cold novel of perception is,
is the, is the only answer to that.
Exactly.
Um, I, I know very few people who truly, truly enjoy reading the, the, the new Vohomo, it seems
quite problematic.
And, you know, as I mentioned, this movement, if we could call it that lasted roughly
until the 1970s, you know, there hasn't been any particular movement toward a, um, a
revival of the new Vohomo, which maybe we could predict for the future, but for the moment,
it seems to be a form that doesn't necessarily speak to, to the contemporary mind.
Well, thank you for summarizing that, uh, very succinctly there in the last, um, in, in the
last statements that you made, because, uh, I, I kind of, we, I've converged with you, at
least on that point there, and I don't know if it's a, uh, a kind of persuasion over to the
side, but I'm, I'm, I'm actually now intrigued enough, I'm going to go back and reread, uh,
and, and read some of the, the, the novels that I actually haven't read yet, and, um, see
if I'm going to be disposed in a different manner.
Great.
So thank you.
We've been talking to, with Christy Wampol here in the Department of French and Italian
at Stanford.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions and Christy, I think you're going to leave us
with a piece of music that is, um, from the new Vohomo orbit.
Yes, this is Michel Butall, who was, um, he's most famous, I think, for Lamborghini
Ficastio and was very well known.
It was really the first part of his ever that was specifically linked with the new Vohomo
CA, but this is a spoken word piece over orchestral music that I'd like to play now.
It's great.
Well, thanks for coming on again.
Bye bye.
Thank you.
[Music]