IF THE NOVEL, or creative literature in general is to maintain its uniqueness, and therefore its value and interest for those international readers open to both printed books or their electronic duplicates, it has to offer a form of writing that is not the same as written commentaries, critical and factual reports, exposures of information, etc. Obviously, fiction or creative literature will draw its inspiration from experiencing the world and its social realities, but such writing will distinguish itself as an imaginative and structural style that is not the same as commentaries, criticism, factual reports or exposures of information.

Sir Herbert Read put it best in his defense of creative writing with visual qualities with this quote from a 1945 interview:

“If you asked me to give you the most distinctive quality of good writing, I would give it to you in this one word: ‘Visual’. Reduce the art of writing to its fundamentals, and you come to this single aim: To convey images by means of words. But to ‘convey images’; to make the mind see.”

A profound and distinct change occurred in the novel or fiction since the mid-20th Century. Most of all, the change occurred first in French novelists like Sartre and Camus, then Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras,  and Phillippe Sollers, who were all under the initial influence of  American novelists like Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Horace McCoy, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, and even Robert Penn Warren.

Previously, the novel mostly reflected the manners and values of individuals, groups, and classes in a taken-for-granted social and national environment, but with the publication of Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ and Camus’s ‘The Outsider’, the novel began to focus on  self-conscious human relations and reactions to nature, objects, products, memories, mental impressions, and time.

This precise focus goes deeper and beyond any specific national or social reality, because it concerns the same primal or universal human involvement of humans with the common experiences of living, which exist in any country, anywhere. 

We see this involvement sometimes as personal obsessions, embedded in the overall content of novels by the American writers mentioned here, and it is this embedded obsession and focus which these French writers extracted, explored, and developed until it became a new understanding and outlook on life via a new type of novel, new fiction, new poetry, new drama, all of which became a vital necessity in civilised contemporary lifestyles everywhere.

However, in Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ and Camus’s ‘The Outsider’, the narrators are alienated individuals; everything is contaminated by their feelings and interpretations. Nothing is what it is; everything the narrators of these novels experience become accomplices to the bad feelings in themselves and towards the world around them.

The theme of human alienation from the world confronted readers of these two novels in a completely new and honest manner; but whereas Sartre’s prescribed solution to such alienation  is commitment to a cause in society, Camus’s position is that we must remain critical and objective in our attitude to the world around us, since this detachment helps us to see others in a more human and morally correct manner.

Camus’s ‘The Outsider’ (1942) is directly similar to the American writer, Horace McCoy’s  masterpiece novel: ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ (1935), but McCoy’s novel is far more innovative and visually effective than Camus’s ‘The Outsider’, which is not a better novel, though a more famous one.

Indeed, McCoy’s novel achieves both Sartre’s wish for a social conscience, as well as Camus’s credo that writers must explore and understand, rather than judge. Though McCoy’s narrator is also like Camus’s narrator, he is also contaminated by the nihilistic and fatalistic views and alienated feelings of the girl he picks up. However, he is much more pleasantly detached, innocent and caring than Camus’s cold and self-righteous narrator in ‘The Outsider’.

The definitive break with worn-out habitual traditional novels occurred later with the arrival of the late Alain Robbe-Grillet on the world’s literary scene in the early 1950s. No writer since then has so convincingly argued and proven by his own novels, and those of other novelists published by the French publishing house, Editions de Minuit, of which he was chief editor, that the new novel (or fiction) can usher in a more tolerant and more pleasurable relationship to the world, and indeed a better world.

Robbe-Grillet’s first novels, ‘The Erasers’, ‘The Voyeur’, ‘Jealousy’, ‘In the Labyrinth’, and ‘La Maison de La Rendezvous’, his screenplay for the profound film ‘Last Year At Marienbad’, and his collection of short fictions, ‘Snapshots’, established him as one of the most beautiful, pleasurable, and interesting  creative writers the world has so far known.

The 1963 publication of his essays on the novel and fiction: ‘For A New Novel’, remains one of the most perceptive and durable positions towards the art of the novel ever published.

Here is a quote from one of the twelve essays in the book:

“To speak of the content of a novel as something independent of its form comes down to striking the genre as a whole from the realm of art… Art is not more or less a coloured envelope intended to establish the author’s ‘message’… Art endures no servitude of this kind, nor any other pre-established function. It is based on no truth that exists before it; and one may say that it expresses nothing but itself. It creates its own equilibrium and its own meaning.”

Robbe-Grillet’s novels and films are not explanations of anything, so they cannot be absolutely summarised or conclusively interpreted by anyone. They exist like objects entirely made of beautiful language in the form of descriptions, imaginative explorations, sights, and actions. In fact, their contents may seem artificial or implausible to any number of pedants with a blueprint for what ‘reality’ is in their minds.

Sensuous description becomes an end in itself, and this can be delicious and satisfying for readers whose reading pleasure exists as they read, in the present, rather than in pursuing an ultimate conclusion to ‘stories’ or ‘plots’ in fiction.

Two major points established Robbe-Grillet’s importance for rejuvenating fiction’s reason to exist. One was his rejection of Sartre’s and Camus’s alienated characterizations, and two, was his use of the popular mystery and suspense novel as a stimulus towards raising the pleasure of literary fiction.

In reference to rejecting alienation as theme and content, this quote from one of his greatest essays, ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy’, is relevant:

“Wherever there is distance, separation, doubling, cleavage, there is the possibility of experiencing them as suffering, then of raising this suffering to the height of a sublime necessity. A path towards a metaphysical Beyond, this pseudo-necessity is at the same time the closed door to a realistic future.”

Robbe-grillet’s appropriation of the popular mystery/suspense novelistic style is false, of course, since in his novels, such anticipation leads nowhere, to no real resolution, as it often does in real Mystery novels or real life. But what it does is re-assert the creative mystery that novel writing should be.

Every novel should be an exploration of the unknown, a formal mystery, yet with an understandable content. The Anglo critic, John Weightman once wrote that Robbe-Grillet’s fiction was more like puzzles, dreams and nightmares, rather  than ‘true’ novels; but what Mr Weightman cannot accept is that these illogical and unreal anecdotes is Robbe-Grillet’s way of saying, simply enjoy the text (Roland Barthes agrees), since there is no ‘heavy’ meaning to be taken seriously, intended by the writer.

Some readers who want ‘meanings’ might also want writing they can exploit as a scapegoat for their own questionable actions in real life. The positive ‘meaning’ which Robbe-Grillet provides is, in fact, a truthful, happy, and practical appreciation of common reality.

Take these sentences from the brilliant short story, ‘The Dressmaker’s Dummy’:

“The coffee pot is on the table. The coffee pot is made of brown China. There is nothing else on the table; only the oilcloth, the tile, and the coffee pot. A pleasant smell of hot coffee is coming from the coffee pot which is on the table.”

This entire little story establishes the unconditional appreciation of commonplace reality. On the other hand, his masterpiece novel, ‘Jealousy’, is not a real representation of  the emotion of jealousy, as it would be presented in the traditional novel. It is, instead, a selective and precise focus on a style of writing, not a duplicate of reality.

Indeed, all novels are only ‘writing’; not duplicates of reality. Only real life is real; not art. However, what the indispensable artist presents, whether as novel, poetry, visual art, music, theatre, or movies, can be a pleasurable antidote to the persistent alienation and disappointment which humans experience between themselves and the world they live in.