The Order and Disorder of Narrative

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2012. Original book

Originally published in 1978.

Like my colleagues Almira and Mandiargues, I had not prepared to speak. I expected that once I did, it would start an argument.

They gave me the title “The Order and Disorder of Narrative,” but I want to connect it to the subject of pleasure that came up this morning. We are somewhat stubborn about the idea of pleasure. We all agree in general that pleasure is something we aim to describe, yet at the same time it cannot be put into words, because one person feels pleasure while another does not. If we try to measure it, we inevitably sink into the cheapest sort of pleasure. Still, researchers have studied and theorized the experience of pleasure in art. I will begin there.

When readers, authors and spectators encounter a work, we can distinguish two almost opposed kinds of pleasure: one comes from recognition, the other from surprise. They oppose each other because, in the first case, we are delighted to get what we expected; in the second, we are delighted by what we did not expect. Clearly, more and more modern art is based on the second kind: on difference rather than on general rules already familiar to both reader and author. Music, rather than literature, is usually used as a metaphor for analyzing these two kinds of pleasure. Umberto Eco almost always uses music as his example, as do many others. For simplicity, I will do the same.

Why? Because, all things considered, music is a simpler system of classification—tonal music in particular, which is often cited as a precise example. It is a simpler system, and therefore more effective than narrative writing. If we analyze tonal music from J. S. Bach to the present, we can see ourselves in a gradual disordering of its system of progression, a disorder that is linked to the pleasure of listening. The system of progression is the way Bach organized the twelve notes of the scale. Among those notes, as you know, the tonal system functions as a generator of difference. Before it came the modal system, which established no hierarchy of functions between different scales. Its consistency lasted for centuries—twenty centuries in China, I think. By contrast, the tonal system, with Bach’s well-tempered clavier, produces difference at once. So, on the one hand, it is a very powerful system of classification; on the other, it naturally invites subversion.

If you listen to a Bach fugue, even if you know nothing about music and have never heard that fugue before, you can listen through to the end. Put a recording of a Bach fugue on the turntable, listen for a while, then stop it at some point in the piece. You can hum the phrase that comes next. In other words, at a given moment one particular chord has a very strong likelihood of appearing, rather than any other chord. A powerful system of classification is also a system of strong probabilities. At every moment the listener expects certain things, as determined by the fugue’s system of tonal possibilities. Or perhaps, from Bach’s later works onward—and I now think even from the beginning—what attracted him was creating differences within that system. From the start, we experience both kinds of pleasure: first, the pleasure of hearing the expected phrase resolve, a confirmation that makes us happy—we live in an orderly, prosperous and blessed world; we hear what we are supposed to hear. Then comes the second pleasure: we hear what we are not supposed to hear. A sudden, enticingly transgressive chord that does not belong.

Imagine that I wanted to sketch the evolution of the tonal system from Bach to Schoenberg. Its second stage is Beethoven, a master of difference. All of Beethoven’s work is based on tonality, on the same rules that existed in Bach’s time. Yet from his early symphonies onward, as the music unfolds and finally bursts open in the late quartets and the Ninth Symphony, what attracted him was making listeners hear what they did not expect. Against a clearly established tonal background comes a non-necessary chord that should not be heard at that moment. A different kind of listening takes hold: no longer the calm happiness of fulfilled expectation, but unease. People sitting in their chairs suddenly say to themselves, “Listen, something is happening; things are coming to life.” In Beethoven’s time this was called dissonance: an out-of-key chord suddenly inserted into B-flat major.

A jarring sound appears on the surface of an established tonality. Beethoven’s skill from then on was to develop that difference by means of a new technique, then recover the tonality that seemed never to have left. That is how dissonance is resolved. This operation embodies the second kind of pleasure: it startles us, but then resolves in a reassuring way. “Ah, all is well! We’re still in B-flat. The world hasn’t changed. Wonderful!”

But as Beethoven’s work developed, difference came to be used more and more widely. In the late works I just mentioned, even good music critics of the time lost their way. The system for resolving dissonance had become the new rule of musical progression. Critics could not keep up. They accused Beethoven of going deaf and said, “We can’t understand this! What is happening? Is there no tonality anymore?” And so on. Yet Bach’s tonal system was still present in the Ninth Symphony. Beethoven had changed the rules. The widely accepted rules of tonal progression had been replaced by a higher-level set of rules born from the resolution of dissonance.

By the time Beethoven died, the musical world had changed, and musicians went on to find a new territory. In it, differences produced by this new order could no longer satisfy the same kind of pleasure—the pleasure of subversion. Wagner is an important marker at this stage. His works still reflect the Bach system, but each chord can belong to several tonalities at once; we call this a “chord flood.” From departure to return, the listener never rests in the same tonality. Listen to Tristan, for example: everything suddenly happens, and you are caught in a somewhat painful, continuous pleasure, amid unending difference and vast unresolved dissonance. Critics objected, of course, but Wagner knew he was changing things, and he was right. In fact, he was only continuing the tonal system while exposing the problem: how can I use the tonal system we have now to create a new pleasure for listeners?

Despite the critics’ shouting, music after Wagner—Gustav Mahler, for instance—became “post-Wagnerian”: the chord flood became the very face of tonality. It intensified as time went on. With Schoenberg, not only could chords belong to several tonalities; tonality disappeared altogether from individual chords and groups of chords. The familiar chromatic scale of Bach—the twelve-note system—had run its course. It was almost unusable, because what disappeared with Schoenberg was precisely the hierarchy of notes that had allowed the tonal system to generate richness through difference.

So we ask: is the death of a system the gradual wearing-out of a system of classification in art? The history of tonality is highly symbolic because, after Schoenberg, composers no longer instinctively wrote with the tonal system. They had to change it or invent something else, something no longer tonal. But when people criticized Schoenberg and called his work the end of music, that was only the end of tonal music. A system of serial classification would produce entirely new music, a music that continues from Schoenberg to the present. After series of pitches came series of timbres, dynamics and so on, making new expectations of new differences possible. What looked like the death of music was, on the contrary, the birth of a new musical system.

The situation in the novel is more complex, but it too involves systems for classifying elements. We can say that we are inheritors of the Romantic system of classification from around 1830. It was the age of the “happy bourgeoisie,” an age when the bourgeoisie ruled the world innocently, still believing itself the legitimate holder of justice, progress, freedom and truth. Flaubert’s arrival is especially significant: it coincided both with the bourgeoisie’s loss of confidence in the legitimacy of its power and with novelists’ own doubts about their authority to write. “Why should I make these workers labor for my purse?” Engels asked. Flaubert’s question was similar: “What gives me the right to narrate?”

That major question has spread through the novel to this day.

But Flaubert was still a direct heir to the happy age. That is, a very small difference could produce enormous energy in a text. This morning we discussed Madame Bovary, so let us take it as an example. It begins very ordinarily: “We were in study hall when the headmaster came in, followed by a…” It is hardly different from Balzac. Then comes the famous description of Charles’s cap, followed by the twelve pages about the market that Maxime Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet advised Flaubert to cut. Why? Because of the rules! The correspondence between Bouilhet, Du Camp and Flaubert, and the surviving drafts about the cap, are extremely interesting. They told Flaubert: “You are leading the reader astray; this contributes nothing to the economy of the narrative,” and so on. In other words, it is a non-essential element in the text. The absurd appearance of an unnecessary element. We see the description of the cap worn by the little boy who will become the husband of Emma Bovary—the future heroine—but he is only fourteen in that passage. We are tempted to explain the cap through cause and effect, sociologically or psychologically, and connect it to Emma’s adult life: this cap supposedly shows that Charles could never be a good husband for such a romantic soul, and so on. That is wrong! At most, Flaubert—and the story itself—wanted to describe this misshapen object intruding into the opening pages. After that, the intrusion grows more serious year by year. So this subversion, born of a powerful difference, gradually alters a firmly established rule. Young writers of seventeen or eighteen sometimes tell me today, “We ask ourselves what we should do now.” They mean that readers thoroughly familiar with the New Novel feel there is nothing in magazines like Tel Quel or Change that can still cause a sensation. The rules have become worn out; the same amount of work now produces a much weaker effect.

Anyone with even a little knowledge of thermodynamics will have noticed that what I have just said can be confirmed by the law of entropy in the field of energy. The word “entropy” is often used by critics today. I want to explain briefly where it comes from for those who do not know. According to the first law of thermodynamics, energy is conserved. In theory, the same isolated system could run forever. A system like Balzac’s, for example, could keep running and produce endless pleasure. But the second law of thermodynamics says that energy declines because motion disturbs particles. In an orderly working system, particles are properly sorted. That is, if there are hot particles and cold particles, and we want the system to work, they must be kept apart; because at that point statistics show a very high probability that a given particle will produce the movement we want.

I say “statistical” because we can never predict the movement of a single particle, but we can predict the movement of particles statistically. Through this possibility of movement—more likely to happen this way than that—we can make the system under examination work. Unfortunately, that movement disturbs the particles. The more a system runs, the harder it becomes for it to run and produce anything. The decline of the Balzac system is the decline of a system of classification that once produced a great deal. Eventually, after the hot and cold particles have moved once, twice, ten thousand times, countless times, they reach a state in which the energy no longer changes. The particles keep moving, but we can no longer predict their movements statistically. We can do nothing with them. The system is called dead; it is in a state of equal probability, where no movement is more likely than another. This is the heat death of the system’s entropy.

The entropy of a system—a closed system, of course—is its tendency to become increasingly difficult to make it produce anything.

Can we therefore say—returning to the novel—that we should now give it up, since we honestly say it is dead? Of course not! The Balzac system was one system from an earlier age. When the New Novel appeared, traditional literary critics wanted us to believe that the Balzac system was the most natural one in France. We know, of course, that this is a lie. It is no more natural than ours. It was simply established by a society as the absolute, final order of narrative. If we are talking about nature, then no. If it were natural, our society would have rediscovered it, and so would other societies around the world. But instead we see every society create its own ways of narrating, just as natural sexuality differs from place to place. Every society, in order to preserve and recreate itself, tends to call its own arrangements “natural.” Let us say again: Balzacian narrative is not natural; it is made by humans. It is a human creation, like every established order, a way of classifying things. Today, a society living on systems of classification that have died need not trouble us. It is no disaster and does not mean the death of humanity. On the contrary, it may mean that a greater revolution is necessary.

We have often said that the New Novel of the 1950s represented a complete revolution compared with the novel that came before it. We said this because the people who then controlled public discussion were astonishingly ignorant. They were the great critics writing in Le Figaro, Le Monde, Les Nouvelles littéraires and similar papers. They had read nothing since Balzac: not Proust, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Faulkner, and certainly not Joyce. So our novels—which, to us, were simply the next step in a further subversion of the system—seemed to them like complete mutations. They were victims of the myth that the Balzacian novel was the essence of the novel: a system built on chronicle, causal continuity and non-contradiction, the three well-known elements of Balzac’s classification system. By contrast, we New Novelists of the 1950s felt that we had produced some very good work overall. In certain respects, our work was less revolutionary than we said it was. Its revolution was more like Wagner’s: he worked within the tonal system he had inherited. More precisely, we were the reverse side of the tradition. And among the different New Novelists, what held the group together—artificially, as all groups are—is the common ancestry we recognized in those earlier writers whom we all considered New Novelists of their own time.

Around the 1960s, by contrast, something that might have been newer appeared: a more radical examination of the standards of classification we had helped advance. I wonder whether anything is developing now, on top of this novel that people claim is dead. Perhaps it is not something new, but something we have not yet recognized. It may be taking shape; it may already be sprouting in my novels, yours or his, without our acknowledging it. In his time, Schoenberg appeared only as the angel of death—he killed the system—not as the inventor of a new musical territory, even though that way of composing would be passed down through generations. The image often used here, borrowing a concept from information science, is a beach: a vast beach on which information can be written. Imagine an untouched beach in front of me, where no one has ever walked, its surface smoothed by nothing but wind and water. I can write an obvious message on that smooth beach very easily. I only have to walk across it, and my footprints will appear. Those footprints, a pattern made of grains of sand that were extremely likely to be where the system put them, will form a huge amount of information, a great sensation, enormous energy and pleasure, all without effort. If a second person walks across, the message remains strong: “Look, two people have crossed the beach.” Then a third, a fourth… If ten thousand people cross it in different directions in one day, you know what will happen: a new equilibrium. It will no longer convey a message, because no single person’s tracks can be picked out. You see only a regular pattern of rolling waves in the sand, an evenly rippled surface. We can walk back and forth over it without changing its appearance. Then we will say, “The novel is dead!”

No! If someone rides a bicycle across that place, a huge message will easily reappear, clear to everyone: “Look, a bicycle has gone by!” I think the artistic period we are talking about is a sad one—no idea where to go, the public and creators cut off from each other, and so on. But it is also an especially exciting time, because almost every system we inherited from our parents is worn out. The bourgeois values that still hold power, for example, are worn out. Their entropy has run its course; nobody believes in them anymore. They are still in power, but they no longer excite us. Remember how exciting they were in Balzac’s time. We may be in an age that requires new inventions, and that need is so strong and undeniable that something has to be invented.