“The New Novel”: A Work That Seeks Ways to Adapt to the Zeitgeist by Dr. Ily Rauner

About fifteen years ago, I sat in on a lecture by David Grossman upon the release of his book, A woman flees from the gospel (The New Library). Grossman stood on the university stage, always eloquent, always pleasant, received with loud applause. I was a doctoral student in French literature, sitting in the hall, absorbed in myself, and at that moment I understood something about the great gap that distinguishes Israeli literature from French literature after World War II. Or at least, so as not to fall into gross generalizations, I understood what I was looking for in French literature, unlike the good writers of Israeli literature.

 Grossman briefly outlined at that time the main points on which a good novel is built: 

1. Plot design. 
2. Characterization of characters who unfold the plot.
3. Connection to reality or Israeli society.
4. Writing that doesn't weigh down on the pleasure of reading.

In other words, the work of the writer, according to Grossman, came down to a number of important points: 

1. To compose stories.
2. To create round characters and existing identities.
3. To represent or imitate a familiar reality, and thus define a particular place and time.
4. To write in a mimetic or transparent manner; to create writing that does not reveal the mechanism of the craft itself.

The facts are clear. This is an Israeli incarnation of a realistic artistic tradition that reached its peak in the 19th century, in Russia and England, and in France in particular, for example, with Honore de Balzac, who sought to explore in the dozens of volumes of The Human Comedy The entire French society in the first half of the 19th century. Here, Balzac himself writes as early as 1842:

I will be the pen that records the history of society, perhaps I will be able to write the history that has been forgotten by many historians, that of their way of life and their laws. With great patience and courage, perhaps I will be able to realize the book that we all wish for. France In the 19th century, what unfortunately remains to us from the culture of Greece, Rome, Persia, and India.  

Israeli literary realism, following Balzac's realism, relies on sociological (or anthropological) investigation and mimetic (mirror) writing. Realism, by its very definition, claims that there is a reality that precedes the writing of the book, there is a world of classes and professions, there are social codes and historical circumstances, there are also psychological issues and complexes, as in any story of a normative man or woman who experienced the political and cultural reality of their time.

In other words, if the reality of the world precedes the writing of the book, the book is secondary to reality, the book depends on reality, and hence the task of the writer is to describe reality, to reveal the real, to observe perhaps like a scientist the various human phenomena and decipher their internal laws, perhaps even to elucidate and explain them; ultimately to preserve them through the creation of the long story (the novel) as an asset of the collective memory. 

And indeed, the realist genre is one of the most beloved and favorite genres of readers in 19th century France, and of readers in late 20th century Israel. In this way, literature manages to acquire an important status within the formation of the national ethos, even before cinema and television, and in parallel with the rise of the printed press, realist literature tells the inner experience of the citizens of the nation.

In contrast to religious myths and sacred literature, literature is being written now, it is a modern creation, written in a living language, and therefore it is a kind of barometer that indicates social fluctuations and the temperament of the individual. From this, one can understand why it is mandatory to study Hebrew and general literature for the matriculation exam in state schools, and hence the loud applause heard at Grossman's lecture, who has recently taken on the role of a moral and emotional compass, similar to Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua.  

What weighs on the realistic perception is the work of art itself. As early as 1880, Gustave Flaubert, accused of being a realist writer himself, criticizes Balzac's books on the grounds that they are closer to statistics or ethnography than to a work of art. “Why inflate what is flat? Why describe nonsense?” Flaubert jokes. 

In the twentieth century, the perception of reality is completely undermined, avant-garde artistic movements proliferate, and as a result, the classical forms of storytelling also fall apart. The big city, the great wars, psychoanalysis, the various theories of relativity in science and philosophy, independent art in painting, photography, and cinema, new music, in short, the fundamental values ​​that are being undermined in the modern world break down the simple possibility of expressing life experience and imitating reality. 

As time passes, the literary work (the novel) is no longer required to represent a previous reality, it is no longer enslaved to values ​​external to it, but is now in service of itself alone. In other words, in the 20th century the novel no longer serves as a field of knowledge alone and is not required to contain all types of knowledge in the world at a given moment, because there is no longer a uniform world of knowledge, or an autarkic cultural structure, knowledge is constantly changing and infinitely detailed. 

“The novel no longer has the function it once had: it is no longer a body of information.” Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote after World War II

In Balzac's time, they learned about the life of a country doctor in Balzac; in Flaubert's time, about the life of an adulteress in Bovary, etc., etc. Now we are aware of all these affairs, completely aware: through the press, through the courts, through television, through medical and social research. Oh! There are whole stories, with documents, with photographs... There is no need for that anymore. I think that the documentary and even psychological function of the novel is over, that is my opinion. But then, what is left for it?

Well, he doesn't have much left, he only has the style... It seems to me that there is definitely something to do there, to create a style. Yes, a writer with a style, there aren't many in the period, you know... This style, it was created in a certain way, it forces the sentences to gently emerge from their common meaning, to take them off the axes, so to speak, to move them out of place. And thus force the reader himself to move the meaning out of place.

Now, one can question Grossman's realist view. First, it is important to ask how it is possible for a twentieth- and twenty-first-century writer not to respond to the enlightening artistic developments of modern literature.

And second, why doesn't realism see its creative work as a work of style whose purpose is to disturb the eye, shake understanding, and enable an incomprehensible experience, with the understanding that creation at its best deconstructs reality in a new way and displaces the prevailing meaning. 

What is the new novel?

This is how we come to French literature, to those writers who interested me when I wrote my doctorate. Here, we come to the “new novel,” that French literary movement that was so pejoratively called in the early 1960s, and since then this label has stuck to it. So, what do these writers say about their work? What is their artistic perception? Let’s return to Grossman’s points, and we find a completely different perception:

1. plot – Instead of a chronological or coherent plot, and instead of a fabric in which everything is well sewn, the plot of the new novel (if there is one) needs to be formed in a broken, fragmented and therefore disturbing way, in order to build in the book an unfamiliar, not “natural” world, and therefore neither delightful nor reassuring to the reader.
2. Characters – It is no longer about building social identities, but about breaking the typical characteristics of the characters. Human identity (personal, general) is not the center of gravity of the work, the “I” itself is broken to pieces and social affiliation is not agreed upon and given in advance. 
3. Connection to reality – The new novel is first and foremost a linguistic act, a work of writing that goes beyond accepted reality. The style is a sharpened sensory array that is not measured by the representation or exposure of social existence, but rather sets its course for an extraordinary movement that shapes a new realistic vision. 
4. The writing – is not required to delight or simplify, to be beautiful or understandable, does not serve the needs of the plot. Writing is an artistic material in itself: it distorts the gaze, arouses the mind, asks about its feasibility (“How to say?” asks Beckett, “In light of all this / all that this this”) It does not know in advance what the product of its moves will be. Therefore, it explores itself in motion: it reveals its questions, its artistic tools and its conditions of thought.  

More well-known and less well-known writers are associated with this literary movement: Samuel Beckett, Rob Grier, Marguerite Duras, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarrot, Robert Pinger, Michel Boutier, and above all the good and humble publisher, Jérôme Lyndon. Works very different from each other, but linked by a “family resemblance” and the aesthetic spirit of the time – “the school of gaze”, “phenomenological literature”, “poetics of things themselves”, “objective writing”, as Roland Barthes put it at the time.

As mentioned, the “new novel” rejects the realistic and naturalistic approach of the 19th century, refuses the broad-based family novel, and opposes initiation novels or the psychological dilemmas of the main characters (not Stendhal, not Balzac, not Madame de la Fayette). 

This is difficult, disjointed writing, aware in advance of the rules of the genre, exploring the craft of the novel itself, wandering through the movement of writing itself. This is writing that traces the literature of consciousness, influenced by the modern writing of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, but in its own way opposes the social mobilization of Sartre and Camus, and the psychologism of the self.

This is a work that questions the boundaries of the book, about what a book is as an act of bricolage or collage without a regular plot, while stretching out as an impossible book. A work that, like any avant-garde movement, seeks new ways, new forms of expression that will suit the spirit of the times, and forms of expression that will shape man's sensual relationship to his world. All this, in parallel with the "New Wave" in cinema and the "New Theater of the Absurd" and the "New Criticism" of French structuralism, and the intellectual revolutions of the sixties and seventies.

Beckett, for example, writes, in the intriguing opening of “The Alusham” (1949): “Where now? When now? Who now? Without asking. Saying I. Without thinking. Calling it questions, hypotheses. Going on, calling it going, calling it on.” An opening that questions the possibility of place, time, and speaker. 

Of Marguerite Duras’s books, Jacques Lacan writes, “She should not know that she is writing what she is writing. Because she could end up in ruin, and that would be a catastrophe.” Roland Barthes, again, argues that the “new novel” tries to see things abstracted from their conventional meaning. “From the writing of the adventure, to the adventure of writing,” Jean Ricardo, another literary critic who rode the wave, puts it beautifully. 

Writing a novel is at the same time also writing about writing a novel. “The New Novel” is at the same time also an essay exploring the craft of the novel. The art of the question itself, which brings the work to its climax: Is creation still possible? – a question that has no answer, perhaps only through the public and academic interest given to this literature, in parallel with the literary awards that were not long in coming:

Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize in 1969, Claude Simon won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985. Marguerite Duras received the Goncourt Prize in 1984 for her book “The Lover,” Rob Grier was elected a member of the French Academy in his later years, but refused to read a prepared speech and wear the traditional academy suit. 

A group photo of the authors of the new novel, a single famous photograph that remains etched in the history of literature. The photo was taken on October 16, 1959, late in the morning (or perhaps in the afternoon) at 7 Brenner Palissy Street, in6th arrondissement in Paris. 7 men and one woman are standing on the sidewalk, right in front of the “Hatzot” publishing house.   

What do you see in the photo?

An Italian magazine commissions photographer Mario Dondero to take a photograph to accompany an article about a new literary phenomenon in France and abroad, a phenomenon that literary critics mockingly describe as “the new novel.” Jérôme Lindon, the tall man on the left of the photograph, organizes the meeting.

Everyone meets – Rob Grelier, Samuel Beckett, Claude Simon, Natalie Sarrot, Claude Mauriac, Claude Aulier, Robert Pinger. (One writer is missing: Michel Boutour, and Marguerite Duras is also missing, apparently not invited) – everyone waits impatiently, each one seems preoccupied with themselves, in sloppy, slightly wintery suits, with a wandering gaze, one lights a cigarette, two are chatting, there is a feeling that they gathered in vain, waiting for the matter to end, some are looking in an unknown direction. The photo seems to be taken incidentally, without those present looking at the camera, and this is how it became the defining photo of the “new novel.” 

A few words about the author

Ily Rauner, lecturer in the French Culture Program at Tel Aviv University. From 2001 to 2008, he lived in Paris, where he studied literature and aesthetics. FrenchHe completed his doctoral studies in 2012. His doctoral thesis deals with French literature and theory in the twentieth century. He is also a writer and translator, winner of the XNUMX Hebrew Writers' Creativity Award. His latest book, The Actor, was published by Pardes Publishing.

You are invited to 3 Zoom meetings about the new novel and Claude Simon, Nobel Prize laureate for literature, on Friday mornings 21.7; 28.7; 4.8.
Reading Simon's book, The Weed (Am Oved, 2017)
Additional details: Ilai Rauner, 0545208639 or ilai.rowner@gmail.com