Cézanne went on being an influence and an inspiration to Claude Simon for all his writing life, and it would be easy to show that his work takes after Cézanne in all sorts of ways: in the sweeping up of the torrent of history into a singular narrative with its singular, compulsive style, which colours the telling and what is told; in its refusal to grant any special status to human and especially moral sentiments, which makes La Route des Flandres in particular so great a war novel; in its ability to create worlds which feel both that they have always existed and that they are only present by virtue of the effort the narrator is making to speak. All this, of course, could also be seen as subscribing to the Mallarméan dictum: ‘Everything happens by means of short cuts, hypothetically; narrative is avoided.’ Which suggests that though there might be a particularly close bond between Simon and Cézanne, it is not so much direct influence we are talking about as the opening up of possibilities by early Modernists. So let us take another writer, very different from Claude Simon, much more sly, much sadder and more comic than him or than Cézanne and Mallarmé, but equally anxious to escape the arbitrariness of conventional narrative, its ready-made quality. Let us look at the opening page of Robert Pinget's 1969 novel, Passacaille:
Le calme. Le gris. De remous aucun. Quelque chose doit être cassé dans la mécanique mais rien ne transparait. La pendule est sur la cheminée, les aiguilles marquent l'heure.
Quelqu'un dans la pièce froide viendrait d'entrer, la maison était fermée, c'était l'hiver.
Le gris. Le calme. Se serait assis devant la table. Transi de froid, jusqu'à la tombée de la nuit.
C'était l'hiver, le jardin mort, la cour herbue. Il n'y aurait personne pendant des mois, tout est en ordre.
La route qui conduit jusque-là cotoie des champs où il n'y avait rien. Des corbeaux s'envolent ou des pies, on voit mal, la nuit va tomber.
La pendule sur la cheminée est en marbre noir, cadran cerclé d'or et de chiffres romains.
L'homme assis à cette table quelques heures avant retrouvé mort sur le fumier n'aurait pas été seul, une sentinelle veillait, un paysan sûr qui n'avait aperçu que le defunt un jour gris, froid, se serait approché de la fente du volet et l'aurait vu distinctement détraqué la pendule puis rester prostré sur sa chaise, les coudes sur la table, la tête dans les mains.
Comment se fier à ce murmure, l'oreille est en défaut.
(see notes for translation)
The first thing to say is how immediate and powerful the hold of the narrative voice is over us. The tone may be abrupt but we quickly adjust and actually take pleasure in filling in the gaps, trying to make sense of what is being said — for it is said in a tone which suggests authority. And yet that ‘quelque chose’ in the first paragraph is a little puzzling. Something must be broken — but what, and broken where? Ah, in ‘la mécanique’ — though nothing shows. It must be the clock that is being talked about. But why ‘must be broken’ if nothing shows? The next sentence is a little odd again, for it is in the conditional — ‘viendrait d'entrer’ instead of ‘venait’ or ‘vient’ — ‘would have come in’. However, we read on. This person has sat down at the table. It is winter. All is in order. Again, as with the broken clock, there is something a little in excess of mere description here, but we can't quite pin it down. Suddenly, though, while the calm narrative tone persists, everything seems to speed up. ‘L'homme assis à cette table quelques heures avant retrouvé mort sur le fumier’ is ambiguous: was the man now sitting at the table found dead a few hours earlier on the dung-heap (and how could he then be sitting at the table?), or was the man sitting at the table a few hours earlier later found dead on the dung-heap? Barbara Wright, Pinget's wonderful English translator, opts for the latter reading, as being the less absurd, but the point is that in the French we feel a sudden lurch as time is compressed, bewilderingly, though again the narrator seems unaware of this but simply proceeds to point out that the man was not alone (‘would not have been alone’) in the room. He was, we are told, being spied upon by someone at the window, who would have seen him dismantling the mechanism of the clock and then sitting again at the table, head in hands. Again the narrative makes a leap, so that we are no longer sure who is speaking or about what: ‘how to trust this voice, the ear is not up to it’.
The narrative is both much slower and much faster than in a traditional novel. Like a piece of music by Birtwistle it spirals forward via repetitions which are never quite repetitions, until we find ourselves in possession of far more information than would have been the case in a conventional narrative or symphony. We have a man alone in a room, sitting at a table, his head in his hands; a clock that may or may not have been interfered with; a corpse on a dung-heap; a watcher at the window. All this would seem to suggest a detective or murder story, but it clearly is not a detective story of the usual type. There is this insistent counterpoint to the detaiclass="underline" ‘something broken in the mechanism but nothing shows’; ‘how to trust this voice, the ear is not up to it’. The mechanism may be the clock, but it may also be the story itself, which someone is trying to tell, and which is both beautifully lucid and full of gaps and even contradictions. Can we make sense of it by latching on to that last phrase and saying: Ah, it's a story about someone (mis)hearing a story? But that doesn't quite work either, for this hypothetical protagonist never materialises, remains, like everything else here, merely latent, ‘hypothetical’. The narrative goes calmly on its odd way, as more and more elements are dropped in, elements which have to do with a possible murder in the depths of rural France, with the backbiting and spying endemic to all village communities, but also with the broken-down mechanism and the unreliable ear, with solitude and desolation and loss. It is, we remember, called Passacaglia, and the musical title is perhaps the one we have to focus on, for, as we read, the narrative generates a sonorous, distinctive music, based, like all baroque music, on repetition and dance. It leaves one, as one finishes it, with the sense of having lived through half a dozen or more potential novels: Simenon-like novels about murder in the rural hinterlands of France, Mauriac-like novels about petty jealousies behind tightly shut windows, Proust-like novels about authors in search of their subjects; of having lived through them or half lived through them, and through so much else — child murder, desperate solitude, the system by and for which one has lived slowly collapsing round and perhaps even within one. But more than that, the book leaves one with the sense of having participated in the birth of narrative itself. And, naturally, having no beginning, the book has no end, no third part, as Kierkegaard would say. When the field has been thoroughly tilled the book stops, for nothing more can or needs to be said.
Our response to it, or to the novels of Claude Simon or Alain Robbe-Grillet, particularly if we have been brought up on a diet of Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch, of Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, is likely to be precisely that which Malcolm Bowie posited of the reader of a Mallarmé poem: either to try to get ‘with panic-stricken rapidity’ at ‘what it means’, or to abandon it for ever. ‘The double effort required to allow Mallarmé's gaps their full disjunctive power’, we recall Bowie saying, ‘yet at the same time remain attentive to the multitude of invisible currents which pass back and forth between the separated segments, will strike many readers as inexcusably arduous and unrewarding.’ Yet, he concludes, ‘the view I shall propose is that time spent learning to read Mallarmé is amply repaid.’ I would only add that Bowie is perhaps a little too defensive, or at least that reading Pinget, Simon or Robbe-Grillet is infinitely easier than reading Mallarmé, and that it is exhilarating rather than arduous. But then I imagine Bowie really believes this holds true for Mallarmé as well.