Nouveau roman

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The term Nouveau Roman ( French for new novel ) describes a direction in French literature that emerged around the mid-1950s - shortly before the Nouvelle Vague of French cinema.

Beginnings

Towards the mid-1950s, a few novels began to attract attention in France that seemed strange. For the majority of newspaper critics and the public, these were books “which the publisher Éditions de Minuit brought out and which were determined to wipe out the Western European tradition of romance by abolishing the hero of the novel and his psychology, by breaking up the plot, by extremely inconsistent constructions and endless obsessive descriptions of completely uninteresting objects. ”Among various collective names for these strange works, the name Nouveau Roman prevailed, which Émile Henriot had used in a book review in Le Monde .

Authors

The authors responded by recognizing "common points", "a consensus in rejecting certain conventions that dominate the traditional novel" ( Claude Simon ), and by some of them ( Nathalie Sarraute , Michel Butor , Alain Robbe-Grillet ) Presented their literary views in essays, interviews and public discussions.

It was not about establishing a “group” or “school”. In contrast to the Surrealists of the 1920s or the Tel Quel group that emerged in the 1960s, there were no communal statements in the form of manifestos, programs, or their own magazine. Rather, individual writers were brought into contact with one another from “outside” (through literary criticism, which discovered similarities in their works) and then dealt with the resulting group picture.

Outlines of a literary conception

In their essays, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and, most radically, Alain Robbe-Grillet tried to justify the need to renew the genre of novels. They turned against the “traditional” novel par excellence, also known as the “19th century novel” or “Balzacroman”. The criticism was of course not aimed at Balzac, but based on the models of the great realistic novels of the 19th century "Novel with Easy Success" (Butor), in which once bold conquests of novelistic narration had become recipes and clichés. The nouveaux romanciers, for their part, saw themselves in a tradition: “ Flaubert , Dostojewski , Proust , Kafka , Joyce , Faulkner , Beckett . Far from doing away with the past, it is easiest to come to an agreement on our predecessors; and our only ambition is to continue their project. We don't want to do it better, that would be pointless, but we want to succeed her, now, in our time. ”(Robbe-Grillet).

Traditional narrative forms should not be changed because they were old, but because they had lost the ability to bring changed realities into view. A sharply perceived discrepancy between personal experience and the world presented in a conventional way justified the project to make the novel a "critical examination of the knowledge of reality" (Butor). The critical return to the novel's involvement in the production of images of reality that influence social thought and action led the Nouveau Roman increasingly to self-reflection. The nouveaux romanciers felt the competition from other disciplines and media (sociology, psychology, journalism, film and television) in reporting on the real world and people's lives as productive pressure on the novel to break away from its traditional task of telling stories and characters to shape, to liberate (Sarraute) and to bring out the main virtue of writing: to give the word duration (Butor).

It was not what the novel was about , but how it did it that became its real subject. For the nouveaux romanciers, the écriture, the design, was the essential statement that a writer can make about the world.

Literary criticism reactions

The Nouveau Roman became an event that triggered a flood of critical considerations internationally. In France itself a literary dispute broke out the likes of which has not occurred since then: the last major controversy about the novel as a privileged means of communication in bourgeois society.

Reflected by literary theorists such as Roland Barthes as an advanced variety of écriture modern and welcomed as a revolution in the genre of novels, the Nouveau Roman was seen by conservative critics as a threat to an entire culture: "Occidental man embedded his fate" in the novel . No matter how shallow the majority of contemporary French fiction may be, no matter how justified the doubts about the narrative ability of a world that has been changed by war and concentration camps, the crisis of the novel would not have required the drastic treatment of the nouveaux romanciers. Their "puzzles" were given a life expectancy of four to five years.

It was precisely the cultural implications of the dispute over the Nouveau Roman that reinforced its social resonance, the curses of one party ("Your novels, Robbe-Grillet, have always only existed on paper. Your characters have never lived ... you burn yours Books ”) and the self-confident heresy of others.

Nouveau Nouveau Roman

The international colloquium “Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd'hui” (New Roman: yesterday, today) in 1971 was the first attempt to see the “Nouveau Roman”, which was then launched by literary criticism, as a truly collective phenomenon. A declaration of affiliation “from within” was initially provided by the participation of those novelists who accepted the invitation: Michel Butor, Claude Ollier , Robert Pinget , Jean Ricardou , Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon. Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras had declined to participate . Common was the awareness of a further development. While the first phase of the Nouveau Roman was largely committed to phenomenological realism, the so-called Nouveau Nouveau Roman (from the mid-1960s) presented itself as a “construction game”, according to the colloquium balance sheet. "Instead of the depiction [représentation] of a given (real) world comes ... the presentation [présentation] of a fictional world, instead of the expression of individuality (of an original, personal self) comes the construction of a text guided by rules, and instead of a message there is an invitation to play with the meaning. ”This characterization was based on the theses of the writer Jean Ricardou, who, coming from the Tel Quel group, became the leading theoretician of the Nouveau Roman. His authority and charisma was linked to the successful attempt in the nouveaux romans to uncover objective similarities at the level of the process, a certain relationship in “strategy and technology”.

For the “strategy”, Ricardou coined the wording that has been widely quoted since then: traditional is what amounts to turning the novel into “the report of an adventure” (“le récit d'une aventure”), whereas modern is what turns the novel into “the Adventure of reporting ”(“ l'aventure du récit ”). "Reading the modern text means not succumbing to an illusion of reality, but paying attention to the reality of the text", the "principles of its creation and organization". Ricardou's structurally shaped way of reading the nouveaux romans, his analytical “screening” of the “secret order of textual work” not only inspired literary scholars and critics. It was also illuminating for authors who - like Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon - highly valued Ricardou's theoretical work and used his textual findings for their own practice. However, when the descriptive, astute elevations of text properties revealed their prescriptive, doctrinal trait, when Ricardou tried to solidify the Nouveau Roman into a collective order (defined by him), it came to a break. When another colloquium on the Nouveau Roman took place in New York in autumn 1982, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon made their participation dependent on Ricardou's absence.

In October 1985, Claude Simon received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In an interview with Swedish television, when asked what is more important to him about this award, money or honor, he said: “The most important thing is that the academy has chosen someone from the generation of the Nouveau Roman. That is recognition. "

literature

  • Nathalie Sarraute: Age of Suspicion. About the novel. Cologne-Berlin 1963. (French: L'Ere du soupçon. Paris 1956.) Michel Butor: Répertoire I. Études et conférences 1948–1959. Paris 1960.
  • Michel Butor: Repertoire II. Études et conférences 1959–1963. Paris 1964.
  • Alain Robbe-Grillet: Arguments for a New Novel. Essays. Munich 1965. (French: Pour un nouvea roman. Paris 1963.)
  • Roland Barthes: At the zero point of literature. Hamburg 1959. (French: Le Degré zéro de la littérature. Paris 1953.)
  • Jean Ricardou, Françoise van Rossum-Guyon (eds.): Nouveau Roman: here, aujourd'hui. Vol. 1: Problèmes généraux. Vol. 2: Pratiques. Paris 1972.
  • Jean Ricardou: Le Nouveau Roman. Paris 1973.
  • Werner Krauss : Revolution of the novel? Comments on the “nouveau roman”. In the other: essays on French literature. Berlin-Weimar 1968
  • Winfried Wehle : French novel of the present. Narrative structure and reality in the Nouveau Roman. Berlin 1972.
  • Winfried Wehle: Proteus in the mirror: on the 'reflexive realism' of the Nouveau Roman. In the same (ed.): Nouveau Roman. Darmstadt 1980 (Paths of Research. Vol. 497)
  • Klaus W. Hempfer : Post-structural text theory and narrative practice. Tel Quel and the Constitution of a Nouveau Roman. Munich 1976.
  • Brigitte Burmeister : Dispute over the Nouveau Roman. Another literature and its readers. Berlin 1983.
  • Brigitta Coenen-Mennemeier: Nouveau Roman. Stuttgart-Weimar 1996.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Réal Ouellet: Les critiques de notre temps et le Nouveau Roman . Paris 1970, p. 7 .
  2. ↑ Madeleine Chapsal: 'Le jeune roman'. Entretiens de Claude Simon and Alain Robbe-Grillet avec Madeleine Chapsal . In: L'Express . Paris January 12, 1961, p. 31-33 .
  3. ↑ Alain Robbe-Grillet: New novel, new person . In: Arguments for a New Novel . Munich 1965, p. 84 .
  4. ↑ Pierre de Boisdeffre: Où va le roman? Paris 1962, p. 288 .
  5. ↑ René-Marill Alberes: Jeux de patience . In: Nouvelles Littéraires . January 14, 1960, p. 31 .
  6. ↑ Pierre de Boisdeffre: La cafetière est sur la table . Paris 1967, p. 10 .
  7. ^ Françoise van Rossum-Guyon: Conclusion et perspectives . In: Nouveau Roman: here, aujourd'hui . tape 1 . Paris 1972, p. 404, 405 .
  8. ^ Jean Ricardou: Le Nouveau Roman . Paris 1973, p. 122-123 .
  9. ^ Karin Feely: Prix ​​Nobel et critique en Suède. Etude de deux cas: Gabriel García Márquez and Claude Simon . Paris 1994, p. 169 .