The Novel After Theory

Judith Ryan

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231528160
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Novels began to incorporate literary theory in unexpected ways in the late twentieth century. Through allusion, parody, or implicit critique, theory formed an additional strand in fiction that raised questions about the nature of authorship and the practice of writing. Studying this phenomenon provides fresh insight into the recent development of the novel and the persistence of modern theory beyond the period of its greatest success. In this book, Judith Ryan opens these questions to a range of readers, drawing them into debates over the value of theory.

Ryan investigates what prompted fiction writers to incorporate and respond to theory nearly thirty years ago. Designed for readers unfamiliar with the complexities of theory, Ryan's book introduces the discipline's major trends and controversies and notes the salient ideas of a carefully selected set of individual thinkers. Ryan follows novelists' adaptation to and engagement with arguments drawn from theory as they translate abstract ideas into language, structure, and fictional strategy. At the core of her book is a fascinating microstudy of French poststructuralism in its dialogue with narrative fiction.

Investigating theories of textuality, psychology, and society in the work of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, W. G. Sebald, and Umberto Eco, as well as Monika Maron, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Marilynne Robinson, David Foster Wallace, and Christa Wolf, Ryan identifies subtle negotiations between author and theory and the richness this dynamic adds to texts. Resetting the way we think and learn about literature, her book reads current literary theory while uniquely tracing its shaping of a genre.

I Theories of Textuality

1 The Death of the Author

Few concepts in literary theory have given rise to such agitation as Roland Barthes’s notion of the “death of the author,” first developed in his essay of the same title (1968). The essay recurred to ideas of Mallarmé and Proust, who argued in favor of a separation between the author of a text and its speaker. Mallarmé’s position had largely to do with his conviction that in a literary text, the pronoun “I” is a function of language rather than the expression of a specific person. Proust, though influenced by Mallarmé on this point, was more concerned to shift the critical emphasis away from the author’s biography. In opposition to the nineteenth-century critic Sainte-Beuve, who maintained that it was impossible to understand a literary work without detailed knowledge of its author’s life and personality, Proust argued that “a book is a product of another self than the one that is revealed in our habits, our social life, and our vices.”¹ Modern linguistics, Barthes argued, gave new support to this idea by developing a new conception of what a text is: recent linguistic theory no longer accepted a simple continuity between a writer and a text produced by that writer. Barthes had already made this point in his contribution to the conference at Johns Hopkins in 1966 when some key French thinkers of the time first presented their ideas to an American audience: “The ‘I’ of the person who writes,” he said on that occasion, “is not the same as the ‘I’ who is read by ‘you.’”² The 1968 essay, “The Death of the Author,” elaborated on this point in a more radical way. “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin,” Barthes wrote.³ The old notion of authorial originality is not justified, since every text is in fact nothing more than a web of language. Every writer builds on what has been written before. Multiple linguistic elements—familiar phrases, fragments from other texts, arguments with points made by others—come together to create an assemblage that cannot solely be ascribed to a single, unitary author. “Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees.”⁴ The text should not be understood as produced by an author, but rather by an anonymous “scriptor,” a writing mechanism devoid of individuality, interiority, or intention. This meant that real-life authors no longer had exclusive authority to determine the meaning of their works. What held any given text together was not the author who had written it, but the reader in whose mind the various elements of the text came together. Thus, in what was to become a much-cited flourish, Barthes argued at the conclusion of his essay that the “death of the author” gave rise to the “birth of the reader.”⁵ Texts were constituted not by their authors, but by their readers; and meaning, consequently, was what the reader found in the text.

Barthes’s argument in “Death of the Author” differs in crucial ways from the author-narrator distinction that has become a foundational element of literary criticism in English-speaking countries.⁶ It is difficult to establish precisely when this distinction was first introduced. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), did not specifically mention the author-narrator distinction, but a precursor of the idea might be seen in their argument against the use of extrinsic and in favor of intrinsic evidence in literary criticism.⁷ The two Americans were concerned with critical judgment as well as with interpretation. They argued vigorously against the view that “in order to judge a poet’s performance, we must know what he intended.”⁸ By the same token, they dismissed appeals to what they termed “author psychology,”⁹ which, they claimed, amounted to preferring “private evidence to public, external to internal.”¹⁰ Following in their wake, but in a somewhat gentler way, Wayne Booth distinguished between the author and what he called the author’s “second self.”¹¹ In a subtle discussion of the degrees of distance that can obtain between the author and various kinds of narrators, Booth pointed out that “in any reading experience there is an implied dialogue among author, narrator, the other characters, and the reader.”¹² In his discussion of these relations, Booth laid the groundwork for what we now call the author-narrator distinction. Barthes’s “Death of the Author” may have seemed less shocking to some English-speaking readers who assimilated his ideas to those of Wayne Booth; but in fact, Barthes’s essay was far more radical. Where Booth leaves room for the author by calibrating degrees of distance between author and narrator, Barthes does not even grant the author as a point of origin for the text.¹³ In arguing, further, that texts are constituted not by their authors but by their readers, Barthes broke down traditional ideas about the limits of interpretation. In this respect, his essay went much further than either Wimsatt and Beardsley or Wayne Booth.

Against the Impersonal Style: Robbe-Grillet’s

Ghosts in the Mirror and Duras’s The Lover

When Alain Robbe-Grillet first began the text that would eventually become Le miroir qui revient (1984; translated as Ghosts in the Mirror), he believed he could count on a readership that regarded the concept of the “author” as outmoded and reactionary. By his own account, he started writing the book “towards the end of 1976 or the beginning of 1977.”¹⁴ Looking back at this period, Robbe-Grillet noted that the concept of the “death of the author” had become so thoroughly assimilated that its impact had been substantially weakened. “The moment a bold theory stated in the heat of battle has become dogma,” he wrote, “it instantly loses its attraction and violence and, by the same token, its efficacy” (Ghosts, 16). Ghosts in the Mirror, he decided, would challenge the formerly audacious concept by raising the older idea of the personal author. In one of many reflective passages in the book, he claims, “I’ve never spoken of anything but myself” (Ghosts, 14). Robbe-Grillet was determined to question the rigid distinction between the author and the narrator of the text. In addition to taking issue with the academy’s unquestioning acceptance of “the death of the author,” however, he was not merely contesting the concept of the impersonal scriptor. He was more specifically taking up a debate between Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes during the 1950s about the neutral style of writing introduced by Albert Camus.

In Writing Degree Zero (1953), Barthes described the style of Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger (1942) as a “transparent form of speech” that achieves “a style of absence which is almost an absence of style.”¹⁵ The opening paragraph of The Stranger gives a good impression of Camus’ manner: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”¹⁶ This transparent style was, for Barthes, the “degree zero” of writing: it is language stripped to its basics. In the debate between Sartre and Barthes, the term used for this type of writing was écriture blanche (“blank style” or “blanched white style”): for Sartre the term was negative, for Barthes it was positive. The French word blanc means both blank and white. Sartre regarded Camus’ écriture blanche as an avoidance of political engagement. By contrast, Barthes believed that the neutral mode was a way of frustrating the reader’s expectation that meaning was to be sought in the characters’ inner life and the assumptions raised by the narrative about social reality. The new style, Barthes claimed, forced the reader to work harder in order to make the novel meaningful. In this way, it functioned to undermine traditional assumptions and push the reader toward a more radical understanding of reality. This type of novel interested him because it shifted attention to writing as such.

The collection of essays by Robbe-Grillet titled For a New Novel (Pour un nouveau roman; 1963) summed up the principles of what was becoming a distinctive literary movement. Michel Butor, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon were other important practitioners of the New Novel, in which plot and character recede while minute details move to the forefront, slowing down the reading process and hampering ready access to a sense of narrative wholeness. Despite the movement’s considerable international success, however, it had begun to run its course by the late 1970s. Robbe-Grillet himself began to feel the need for a new approach.

Throughout Ghosts in the Mirror, he takes issue with the notion that the narrative voice of his early works is a “blank” one. Given the support he had received from Barthes from the mid-1950s on, this may seem somewhat ungrateful; but by the 1970s and 1980s, the culture was more overtly politicized. Now Robbe-Grillet needed to show what a careful reader of his earlier texts would have perceived: that he had in fact never failed to confront political and moral issues.¹⁷ Ghosts in the Mirror is certainly not written in Robbe-Grillet’s earlier manner. Its style is complex and its structure multilayered: different modes combine to create a text composed of many different ingredients.

The opening paragraph of Ghosts in the Mirror speaks from an autobiographical position: it tells how Robbe-Grillet first began working on the book. But even as the book seems to set up an “autobiographical pact,”¹⁸ it also comments on the problem of the personal versus the impersonal style. In this way, the opening defies the automatic reaction of contemporary literary criticism that calls for readers to distinguish between author and narrator. Early in the book, however, the autobiographical stance is interrupted by forms of writing less easy to identify. Gradually, we come to realize that Ghosts in the Mirror is an intercalation of three different literary genres: autobiography, literary essay, and romance. This mixture complicates our understanding of characters and events, of reality and fiction, and the often unclear lines between the component genres create challenging ambiguities for the reader.¹⁹

In a memoir-like passage, Robbe-Grillet tells us that his early novel The Voyeur (1955) received two important reviews. One, by Maurice Blanchot, focused primarily on the sexual crime at the invisible center of the novel, while the other, by Roland Barthes, did not notice at all the narrator’s elision of this crime (Ghosts, 135). It seems odd that Barthes, the proponent of the blank style, did not look for what it might conceal. Did the blank style have the effect, at least on some readers, of obscuring moral issues? If so, that would appear to give Sartre the victory in the debate about stripped-down writing. In Ghosts in the Mirror, Robbe-Grillet claims that his own early style was in fact a coat of armor that concealed something quite other than the innocence it seems to project (Ghosts, 38). He goes on to suggest that there may be a connection between Barthes’s insistence on the impersonal mode and his apparent inability to perceive ethical issues hidden beneath the surface of texts written in such a mode.²⁰

Most of the autobiographical material in Ghosts in the Mirror has to do with historical and political reality. The mysterious Henri de Corinthe, who appears not only in the autobiographical parts of the book but also in those that imitate medieval romance, encapsulates the problem of the blanched white style. In the medieval romance plot, which recounts old Breton stories told by Robbe-Grillet’s grandmother, Corinthe appears as a kind of white knight, swept up in an emotional search for his lost bride.²¹ His actions in the autobiographical parts, however, stand in direct opposition to the white knight figure. Here, Henri de Corinthe is revealed to have been a neighbor of Robbe-Grillet’s father, a political reactionary and Nazi sympathizer during the German occupation of France. We never discover exactly where Corinthe stands politically: we do not know if he is a collaborator or a member of the resistance.²² This strand of the book reflects on the history of the German occupation of France by pointing out that, in addition to courageous men and women of the resistance, there were also people who collaborated with the Nazis. This raises tough questions about the “blanched white style.” Barthes’s use of the term to apply to The Voyeur is troubling precisely because the novel calls for its readers to recognize the unmentioned crime at its center. The emergence of the New Novel in the 1950s was solely an experiment in writing: it was also a way of probing blind spots, not just those in an individual field of vision, but those in our broader understanding of self and history. It is no accident that these novels began to appear in the fifties, a period when collaboration with the Nazis could scarcely be addressed outright, but when the immediate shock of the occupation was making a collected appraisal more possible. From this perspective, the “blanched white style” covers up the guilt of a narrator who refuses to confront directly crimes in which he himself may have been indirectly implicated. The apparently clean and innocent surface conceals something disturbing underneath. It is a cover that invites us to pull it away. To regard The Voyeur as merely a formal exercise would be to underestimate the moral scope of the novel.

What is the connection between the two versions of Henri de Corinthe? In the flamboyantly written medieval episodes, Corinthe is connected with a mirror that keeps on reappearing in the course of his wild ride. The mirror alludes to Stendhal’s famous phrase about realism: “The novel is a mirror being carried along a road.”²³ Through this allusion, Robbe-Grillet’s text engages with the traditional problem of realism, yet it does so, paradoxically, in its more stylized rather than in its plainer sections. This also raises questions for the reader. Why does Ghosts in the Mirror make this link with realism? In order to answer this question, we need to recall that the New Novel was also realism of a sort. Stripping away the dense description that had characterized the nineteenth-century novel, the New Novel restricted itself to what could be seen from the vantage point of a single character. Yet its point of view was concerned not only with what the character saw, but also with the blind spot in the character’s field of vision. Robbe-Grillet’s Ghosts in the Mirror is a retrospective on his earlier novels, which reflected on French guilt during the German occupation even as they seemed to focus on quite different topics such as, in the case of The Voyeur, sexual jealousy. In this way, Ghosts in the Mirror argues against the notion that the blanched white style is one that avoids engagement with moral issues.

One year after the publication of Robbe-Grillet’s Ghosts in the Mirror, Marguerite Duras presented her own challenge to Barthes in L’Amant (1984; The Lover).²⁴ The temporal closeness of the two works and the fact that both lack the genre definition “novel” beneath their titles suggests a new phase in these writers’ understanding of the author function.²⁵ Like Ghosts in the Mirror, The Lover also depends on autobiographical material, while at the same time teasing the reader about the degree of fictionality with which it is cloaked. By using an unnamed narrator, Duras’s narrative appears at first glance to support Barthes’s contention that writing is a disembodied function that is neither the author as a person nor the author in the guise of a literary personage.²⁶ Yet although the narrator remains anonymous, the text ends with a precise indication of the time and place of composition: “Neauphle-le-Château—Paris. February-May, 1984” (Lover, 117). These were places where Duras actually lived at the time, as many French reade...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Knowing Theory
• Part I: Theories of Textuality
• Part II: Psychological Theories
• Part III: Theories of Society
• Conclusion: Talking Back to Theory
• Notes
• Index