Atheism and The Avant‐Garde

Extract

On the face of it, the ‘neo-modernist’ aesthetic is radically atheistic. (I borrow the term from Frank Kermode’s essay Modernisms, in Innovations, edited by Bernard Bergonzi.) For example Jean Alter has pointed out that in Robbe-Grillet’s world everything is meticulously present except that which is associated with God. Wallas, in Les Gommes, on the lookout for ways of finding his correct route without giving himself away, asks for the post office but not the cathedral: for the town has none. The island in Le Voyeur has a cinema, a café, a garage and a hotel, but no church. In L'Immortelle the religious manifestations are treated simply as tourist attractions, having no religious meaning. Now, the absence of all reference to religion, despite the meticulous rendering elsewhere of visible detail, is itself highly unrealistic. It points to the real message of Robbe-Grillet’s apparently neutral and value-free fiction; namely the discontinuity between human beings and the material environment. There can be no ‘complicity’ between man and the world for ‘les choses sont les choses, et l’homme n’est que l'homme’. (Pour un Nouveau Roman.) In so far as religion, and the objects associated with it, exist for the sake of establishing some rapport between the world and the people God has put in it, religion for Robbe-Grillet is simply a false trail, a cul-de-sac. The whole apparatus of symbolism, sacraments and prayer is therefore ignored, as something of no account in a fiction that concerns itself with life as it really is.

Now, if Alter is right, Robbe-Grillet’s deliberate and calculated refusal to include anything to do with religious activity shows that his aesthetic is not ideologically neutral, but critical. It keeps its distance from the world of ‘bare facts’, takes up a stance towards them.