figure 5 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, c. 1659.
an attempt to record a fact and to me therefore must be much more exciting and much more profound. One of the reasons why I don't like abstract painting, or why it doesn't interest me, is that I think painting is a duality, and that abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interested in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes. We know that most people, especially artists, have large areas of undisciplined emotion, and I think that abstract artists believe that in these marks they're making they are catching all these sorts of emotions. But I think that, caught in that way, they are too weak to convey anything … You see, I believe that art is recording; I think it's reporting. And I think that in abstract art, as there's no report, there's nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his few sensations. There's never any tension in it.
Rembrandt (and Bacon), he is saying, are taken out of themselves by the object before them, which moves them so deeply that they want to make it live again through their own efforts. So they owe a double allegiance: to the object out there in the world, and to the artwork. Abstract painters, he suggests, only have allegiance to the artwork, and to themselves. Hence the work will lack what he feels to be a vital ingredient. Sylvester, however, is puzzled: ‘If abstract paintings are no more than pattern-making, how do you explain the fact that there are people like myself who have the same sort of visceral response to them at times as they have to figurative work?’ Bacon will have no truck with this. ‘Fashion’, he replies imperiously. But lest we be tempted to dismiss this as too glib, let us remember Joseph Koerner's comment on Friedrich and the claims that have been made for him as the precursor of abstract expressionism.
The problem of abstraction and the problem of how to deal with Duchampian scepticism would seem to be issues confined to the visual arts, but that is not the case. Just as Krauss could use Adorno's (misguided) critique of Stravinsky to make a point about Picasso, so we should be able to move from problems which first surfaced in the realm of painting to music and literature. The divide between Duchamp and Picasso is clearly evident in the divide between John Cage and his followers on the one hand, and composers such as Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Ligeti and Kurtág, on the other. These composers, who all came of age in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, believed that the war and the devastation it had brought had given them a chance to start again, in a sense, ignoring for the most part the traditions of classical and Romantic music. But whereas Cage, the American, opted for a version of Duchampian scepticism, the Europeans found their inspiration in medieval and Renaissance music and the musics of the far East and central Africa. In place of Cage's Buddhist-inspired irony there was a new idealism, a new sense of being able to go forward, inspired by the work of their early Modernist predecessors, Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky and Varèse. In time, of course, some of them, like Berio and Kurtág, even found a place in their work for Schubert and Mahler. Where Cage and his followers drew the conclusion that all traditions were dead, they began to forge new, more inclusive traditions, though always aware that their relation to them could never be that which had obtained in the time of Bach or Haydn.
But what of literature? As it happens there is a nice example to hand of how the Picasso moment of 1912 is destined to be played out again and again whenever Modernism is in question. In the 1950s a young French agronomist who had briefly been a prisoner of war in Germany and then worked on banana plantations in Africa, began to try his hand at the writing of fiction, first with short stories and then with a mysterious novel based on Oedipus Rex in which the detective detailed to investigate a murder finds that the murder has not (yet) taken place, and ends up committing it himself. Clearly what interested the young Robbe-Grillet in the Greek tragedy was its inexorable quality, the fact that there is nothing arbitrary in the plotting, that all unfolds with the relentlessness of a machine. In his subsequent novels, Le Voyeur, La Jalousie and Dans Le Labyrinthe, he found his voice and produced a series of masterpieces. As his most acute critic, Maurice Blanchot, immediately discerned, the cold, precise descriptive style Robbe-Grillet perfected had nothing to do with hyper-realism but rather was the means of articulating a nightmare vision in which the light is always at maximum brightness but its source remains mysteriously hidden, in which something has possibly taken place which the narrative not only cannot articulate but is at pains to conceal even from itself. In Le Voyeur it is the murder of a child; in La Jalousie it is an act of marital betrayal. These novels are like no others, but they do conform to the Mallarméan injunctions: they proceed by means of hypothesis and by short cuts, and the anecdote is eschewed. Because the obsessive consciousness is at the heart of each, the author is released from the need to tell a story, to move on from event to event, with the sense that this would bring with it of the thinness and insubstantiality of what is being depicted, as well as of its arbitrary nature. Instead, as in Pinget, we have the impression of a field being explored; when it has been thoroughly tilled the book ends, leaving us with a powerful sense of having undergone an intense if inarticulate experience.
The feeling of being in a labyrinth from which it is impossible to escape, already strong in Robbe-Grillet's first novel, Les Gommes, is most clearly evident in his fourth, Dans le Labyrinthe. But in this story, of a soldier seeking to deliver a parcel the contents of which he does not know in a town which is both familiar and unfamiliar, the compulsive centre from which the previous two novels had radiated is less intense — there is no crime or outrage to explain why it is the soldier wanders in his labyrinth. The story, with its rhythms of returning again and again to the same spot, hovers between the terrifying and the pleasurable, perhaps the kind of pleasure Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain felt he would experience if he lay down in the snow and allowed himself to doze off. The rhythms of the sentences and of the movements of the soldier, for ever striving forward but getting nowhere, lull us into a kind of will-less concentration, such as those who meditate tell us they experience. It is Robbe-Grillet's most beautiful book, held in a kind of gentle tension, like some of Wallace Stevens's greatest poems, between meaning and the abandonment of meaning, mysterious, like them, and, like them, precise in every word.
But after that novel something seems to have happened to Robbe-Grillet's work. It is as if he had suddenly discovered that the free circulation of the sign, to use Rosalind Krauss's terminology, had made it possible for him to do anything he wished, and henceforth he does just that — but at the cost of leaving us indifferent to what he is doing, leaving us, in effect, just as Bacon described himself left by abstract art, bored by the lack of tension. We were certainly not indifferent to what was unfolding in Le Voyeur and La Jalousie, even if we were unclear as to just what was unfolding. We wanted to know the outcome even as we came to realise that we never would. From his fifth novel on, we can admire Robbe-Grillet's pellucid style but we cease to have any interest in his books. Unfortunately too, for Robbe-Grillet as for his fellow-novelist Claude Simon, this was just the moment when the brilliant critic Jean Ricardou began to publish his spirited defence of the nouveau roman — but a defence that was so powerful, so fool-proof precisely because it started from the premise that the free circulation of the sign meant that art had finally, thankfully, cut itself off from the world and had only itself to worry about. In a famous debate Robbe-Grillet claimed that he began from a word and let it carry him where it would, while Nathalie Sarraute, the ‘mother’ of the nouveau roman, insisted that one began with a darkness which one felt the need to penetrate. Robbe-Grillet would have none of this: Kandinsky and the Surrealists, Picabia and Pop Art had, in effect, for him, replaced Picasso. Only Pinget and Duras, the least intellectual of the group, continued to develop, producing works that were at times flawed, at times embarrassingly bad, but also at times masterpieces of the order of Passacaille or L'Amante anglaise. There is no clearer indication that in the field of literature as well as in the fine arts, Picasso's instinctive aversion to both abstraction and the mass-produced was the result of his correct intuition as to where lay the health of art and the true destiny of Modernism.