The Age of Suspicion (7 page)

It was doubtless this that prompted Gide to say that he had collected the raw material for a great work rather than achieved the work itself, and brought upon him the serious reproach still made today by his opponents, of having gone in for 'analysis', that is to say, in the most original parts of his work, of having incited the reader to use his own intelligence, instead of giving him the sensation of re-living an experience, of accomplishing himself certain actions, without knowing too well what he is doing or where he is going—which always was and still is in the very nature of any work of fiction.

But isn't this like reproaching Christopher Columbus with not having constructed the port of New York?

Those who have followed him and who have wanted to try and make these subterranean actions re-live for the reader as they unfold, have met with certain difficulties. Because these inner dramas composed of attacks, triumphs, recoils, defeats, caresses, bites, rapes, murders, generous abandons or humble submissions, all have one thing in common: they cannot do without a partner.

Often it is an imaginary partner who emerges from our past experiences or from our day-dreams, and the scenes of love or combat between us, by virtue of their wealth of adventure, the freedom with which they unfold and what they reveal concerning our least apparent inner structure, can constitute very valuable fictional material.

It remains nonetheless true that the essential feature of these dramas is constituted by an actual partner.

For this flesh and blood partner is constantly nurturing and renewing our stock of experiences. He is pre-eminently the catalyser, the stimulant, thanks to whom these movements are set in motion, the obstacle that gives them cohesion, that keeps them from growing soft from ease and gratuitousness, or from going round and round in circles in the monotonous indigence of ruminating on one thing. He is the threat, the real danger as well as the prey that brings out their alertness and their suppleness; the mysterious element whose unforeseeable reactions, by making them continually start up again and evolve towards an unknown goal, accentuate their dramatic nature.

But at the same time that, in order to attain to this partner, they rise up from our darkest recesses towards the light of day, a certain fear forces them back towards the shadow. They make us think of the little grey roaches that hide in moist holes. They are ashamed and prudent. The slightest look makes them flee. To blossom out they must have anonymity and impunity.

They consequently hardly show themselves in the form of actions. For actions do indeed develop in the open, in the garish light of day, and the tiniest of them, compared with these delicate, minute inner movements, appear to be gross and violent: they immediately attract attention. All their forms have long since been examined and classified; they are subject to strict rules, to very frequent inspection. Finally, very obvious, well-known, frank motives, thick, perfectly visible wires make all this enormous, heavy machinery work.
{10}

But lacking actions, we can use words. And words possess the qualities needed to seize upon, protect and bring out into the open these subterranean movements that are at once impatient and afraid.

They have in their favour their suppleness, their freedom, the iridescent richness of their shading, their transparency or their opaqueness.

Their rapid, abundant flow, with its restless shimmer, allows the more imprudent of them to slip by, to let themselves be borne along and disappear at the slightest sign of danger. But they risk little danger. Their reputation for gratuitousness, lightness, inconsistency—they are, after all, pre-eminently the instruments of frivolous pastimes and games—protects them from suspicion and from minute examination: we are generally content to make purely formal verification of them; they are subject to rather
lax
regulations; they rarely result in serious sanctions.

Consequently, provided they present a more or less harmless, commonplace appearance, they can be and, in fact, without anyone taking exception, without the victim even daring to admit it frankly to himself, they often are the daily, insidious and very effective weapon responsible for countless minor crimes.

For there is nothing to equal the rapidity with which they attain to the other person at the moment when he is least on his guard, often giving him merely a sensation of disagreeable tickling or slight burning; or the precision with which they enter straight into him at his most secret and most vulnerable points and lodge in his innermost recesses, without his having the desire, the means, or the time, to retort. But once they are deposited inside him, they begin to swell, to explode, they give rise around them to waves and eddies which, in turn, come up to the surface and spread out in words. By virtue of this game of actions and reactions that they make possible, they constitute a most valuable tool for the novelist.

And this, no doubt, is why, as Henry Green has noted, characters in fiction have become so talkative.

But this dialogue, which tends more and more, in the modern novel, to take the place left by action, does not adapt itself easily to the forms imposed by the traditional novel. For it is above all the outward continuation of subterranean movements which the author—and with him the reader—must make at the same time In the character, from the moment they form until the moment when, having been forced to the surface by their increasing intensity, to reach the other person and protect themselves from exterior dangers, they cloak themselves in the protective capsules of words.

Nothing, therefore, should break the continuity of these movements, and the transformation they undergo should be analogous to that sustained by a ray of light when it is refracted and curves as it passes from one sphere into another.

This being the case, there is really no justification for the heavy indentations and dashes with which we are accustomed to make a clear-cut separation between dialogue and what precedes it. Even the colon and quotation marks are still too apparent, and it is understandable that certain novelists (for instance, Joyce Cary) should strive to blend dialogue with its context—to the extent that this is possible—by simply marking the separation with a comma followed by a capital.

But even more awkward and hard to defend than indentations, dashes, colons and quotation marks, are the monotonous, clumsy, 'said Jeanne,' 'answered Paul,' with which dialogue is usually strewn; for contemporary novelists these are becoming more and more what the laws of perspective had become for painters just before Cubism: no longer a necessity, but a cumbersome convention.

Indeed, it is curious to see that, today, those very novelists who refuse to let themselves become what they consider to be needlessly disturbed, and who continue to use the devices of the old-fashioned novel with blithe assurance, seem unable to escape a certain feeling of uneasiness as regards this particular point. It is as though they had lost that certainty of being within their rights, that innocent unawareness that gives to the 'said, resumed, replied, retorted, exclaimed etc. . . .'
with
which Madame de Lafayette or Balzac so brightly studded their dialogues, that look of being securely where they belong, indispensable and perfectly as a matter of course, that makes us accept them without raising an eyebrow, without even noticing it, when we re-read these authors today. And compared to them, how self-conscious, anxious and unsure of themselves contemporary novelists seem, when they use these same formulas.

At times—like people who prefer to flaunt and even accentuate their faults to ward off danger and disarm their critics—they ostentatiously renounce the subterfuges used ingenuously by writers of the old school (which today seem to them to be too gross and too easy, and which consisted in constantly varying their formulas), and expose the monotony and clumsiness of this device by repeating tirelessly, with affected negligence or
naïveté,
'said Jeanne,' 'said Paul,' 'said Jacques'; the only result being to fatigue and irritate the reader all the more.

At others, they try to make these unfortunate 'said Jeanne,' 'replied Paul,' disappear, by following them, on every occasion, with repetitions of the last words of the dialogue: 'No, said Jeanne, no' or: 'It's finished, said Paul, it's finished.' This gives to the words the characters speak a solemn, emotional tone which obviously does not correspond to the author's intention. Then, again, they do away as much as possible with this cumbersome appendix by continually introducing the dialogue in a still more artificial way which we feel does not answer to any inner necessity: Jeanne smiled: 'I leave the choice to you,' or: Madeleine looked at him: 'I was the one who did it.'

All these resorts to too apparent subterfuges, all these embarrassed attitudes, are a source of great cheer to followers of the moderns. They see in them premonitory signs, proof that something is falling apart, that there is filtering insidiously into the minds of the supporters of the traditional novel a doubt as to the merits of their rights, a scruple at entering into possession of their inheritance, which, without their realising it, make of them, as it were, the privileged classes before revolutions, the agents of future upheavals.

Indeed, it is not by mere chance that it should be at the moment when they use these short, apparently harmless formulas that they feel most ill at ease. For, in a way, these are symbols of the old regime, the point at which the old and the new conceptions of the novel separate most distinctly. They mark the site on which the novelist has always located his characters, that is, at a point as remote from himself as from the reader; there, where the players in a tennis match are to be found, while the novelist occupies the place of the umpire perched on his stool, supervising the game and announcing the score to the fans (in this case, the readers) seated on the side-lines.

Neither the novelist nor the readers leave their seats to play the game themselves, as though they were players.

And this remains true when the character expresses himself in the first person, as soon as he begins to follow his own statements with, 'I said,' 'I cried,' 'I replied,'
etc.
...
He shows by this that he himself does not perform, nor does he make his readers perform, the inner movements that prepare the dialogue, from the moment they originate until the moment when they appear externally, but that, keeping himself at a distance, he makes this dialogue start up in the presence of an insufficiently prepared reader whom he is obliged to warn.

Being thus on the outside and at a distance from his characters, the novelist can adopt devices that vary from those of the Behaviourists to those of Marcel Proust.

Like the Behaviourists, he can make his characters speak without any preparation while he remains at a distance, limiting himself to apparently recording their dialogues and thus giving the impression of allowing them to live lives of their own.

But nothing is more deceptive than this impression.

Because although the little appendix that the novelist makes follow their spoken words shows that the author gives his creatures their head, it recalls at the same time that he is keeping a firm hold on the reins. These: 'said,' 'continued,' etc. . . . that are delicately inserted in the midst of the dialogue, or prolong it harmoniously, are quiet reminders that the author is still present, and that this fictional dialogue, despite its apparent independence, cannot do without him and stand alone in the air, the way theatrical dialogue does; they are the light but strong ties that bind and subject the style and tone of the characters to the style and tone of the author.

As for the famous
intaglio
implications that the supporters of this system think they obtain by giving no explanations, it would be interesting to ask the most experienced and most sensitive among their readers to tell sincerely what they perceive, when left to themselves, beneath the words spoken by the characters. How much do they guess of all those tiny actions that subtend and set the dialogue in motion, giving it its real meaning? Undoubtedly the suppleness, subtlety, variety and abundance of words permit the reader to sense movements underneath them that are more numerous, sharper and more secret than those he can discover underneath actions. We should nevertheless be surprised by the simplicity, the grossness and the approximation of his perceptions.

But it would be a mistake to blame the reader.

Because, to make this dialogue 'life-like' and plausible, these novelists give it the conventional form that it has in every-day
life:
it consequently reminds the reader too much of the dialogues he himself is accustomed to record hastily, without asking too many questions, without looking for hidden difficulties (he has neither the time nor the means to do so, and this is exactly what the author's work consists of) being content to perceive beneath the spoken words only what allows him to order his own conduct somehow or other, without lingering morbidly over vague, dubious impressions.

But better still,
what
the reader discovers beneath these fictional dialogues—however loaded with secret meanings their author may have wanted them to be—is not much compared with what he himself can discover when, as a participant in the game, with all his instincts of defence and attack aroused, excited and on the alert, he observes and listens to those with whom he is talking.

Above all, it is not much compared to what the spectator learns from theatrical dialogue.

Because theatrical dialogue, which needs no props, and during which the author does not constantly make us feel that he is present, ready to lend a hand; this dialogue, which must be self- sufficient and on which everything rests, is denser, tauter, more compact and at a higher tension than fictional dialogue: it also makes greater demands on the combined powers of the spectator.

But above all, the actors are there to do most of the work for him. Their entire task consists in recapturing and reproducing within themselves, at the cost of great, prolonged effort, the tiny, complicated inner movements that have propelled the dialogue, that give it weight, distend and tauten it; and, by their gestures, their acting, their intonations, their silences, in communicating these movements to the audience.