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George H. Thomson's essay on 'In Watermelon Sugar'
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Objective Reporting as a Technique in the Experimental Novel: A Note on Brautigan and Robbe-Grillet

by George H. Thomson
University of Ottawa

The convention of objective reporting, practiced in varying degrees by conscious realists from the later nineteenth century onwards and theorized upon so eloquently by Joyce's Stephen Dedalus has undergone a strange transformation in the experimental novel of recent years, though in fact Joyce had already carried through the transformation in Ulysses by his multifarious combinations of minutely reported detail and subjective point of view.

Objective reporting as a narrative style is associated with a certain kind of realism in which ostensibly reality speaks for itself while the implied author concentrates on his fingernails. Because language is value saturated, an illusion of objectivity is difficult to achieve. When we encounter it, therefore, we can be very nearly certain it is the result of extreme calculation. This will be even more obviously the case when, as is some recent fiction, reportorial detachment is used only incidentally to create a realistic effect and primarily to disguise an unlikely and discontinuous subject matter.

I have in mind novels like Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur (1955) and Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar (1968). In such works, objective reporting is good at rationalizing improbable and fragmented content because it is natural for an objective account to omit explanatory connectives such as motives and causes. As a result, a character, event, or setting, may seem dissociated from its surroundings without the effect of appearing forced. Moreover, the selection and arrangement of story material may be extremely arbitrary since the implied author or narrator, with respect to justifying the nature and order of details comprising the narrative, has contracted out of any obligation except that of creating an initial illusion of realistic surface.

Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur (1955) is relentlessly reportorial. But we soon notice there is something strange about the mind to which the report is tied. Is the observation obsessional? Is it a product of fantasy? We cannot at first be sure. The sense of reality and order is undermined while at the same time it is urgently insisted upon by the unfailing meticulousness of the reported observations. The sense of an objectively coherent reality is both asserted and denied.

Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar (1968) has another end in view. The first person narrator, who appears detached, fails to mention what motives or causes might explain the events of the story. More than that, the world he describes, within which chronology is sustained but the logic of events is abolished, has the strangeness of fantasy. Brautigan puts his detached style of narration in the foreground only to undercut and then displace its effect by his reliance on fantasy-like subject matter. On the other hand, Robbe-Grillet puts his realistic style of narration in the foreground and then undercuts but does not displace its effect by his use of confusing, obsessional, and bizarre subject matter. Though the approaches differ, the technique in each case is designed to allow the author under the guise of order and detachment to introduce discontinuity and improbability: literal fantasy in Brautigan, psychological fantasy in Robbe-Grillet. It is striking, too, that in these novels we encounter no strong sense of unconscious ordering, and this in spite of our being locked into a single point of view within which time and space are subjectivized. What we feel rather is a thoroughly calculated technique of combining first-person point of view (subtly interlaced with third in Le Voyeur) with objective reporting.

The result is deliberately to subvert the kind of realism originally aspired to by the fictional practitioners of reportorial objectivity. The subversion in these novels has not been taken any further than Joyce took it, though within narrow limits it has been exploited a little more fully, especially by Robbe-Grillet. And the moral to the story is that even an apparently conservative technique can readily be stood on its head by the modern novelist intent upon the calculated disarrangement of realistic expectations.


Notes on Contemporary Literature? 8.4
September 1978: 2



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