Volume 7, Number 9 · December 1, 1966
The Indeterminate I
By John Weightman
Fever
by J.M.G. Le Clézio, translated by Daphne Woodward
Atheneum, 256 pp., $4.95
The Opoponax
by Monique Wittig, translated by Helen Weaver
Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $4.95
The French 'New Novel,' although still an amorphous entity very difficult to define, is now old enough to have produced a second generation of exponents, among whom I would place these two new authors, who have been the most widely acclaimed young writers to appear during the last two or three years. La Fièvre, a collection of short stories written in the 'New Novel' manner, is Le Clézio's second book; the first, Le Procès-verbal, won one of the annual literary prizes two years ago. Mlle. Wittig is also a prize-winner; L'Opoponax has been awarded the Prix Medicis and has been praised by two older 'New Novelists,' Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. It has also been discussed enthusiastically and at length in the New Statesman by Miss Mary McCarthy, who seems to consider it as being almost as important as Mme. Sarraute's Fruits d'or, which, in her view, is already a classic. I may as well say at once that, while I respect the writings of Mlle. Wittig and Mme. Sarraute, I find Miss McCarthy's comments on L'Opoponax rather more stimulating than the book itself, just as I felt that her theories about Fruits d'or related to some novel that she herself might possibly have liked to write, but which was not convincingly embodied, at least for me, in Mme. Sarraute's actual work. And, generally speaking, most 'New Novels' strike me as providing more enjoyment through the discussion they arouse than through the preliminary reading of the text. This may mean that I cannot react directly to a new crystalization of sensibility and have to fall back on trying to grasp it intellectually. Or it may be indicative of something paradoxical in the 'New Novel' itself, which concentrates so fiercely on certain limited approaches to reality that its main usefulness is to irritate the reader into a reassessment of his general concept of consciousness.
Review, 1627 words
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