Trio (33 page)

[
SB: Dr. Stephen Bann: Article in 20th Century Studies, Dec. 1971: “Robert Pinget: the end of a modern way.”

MC: Madeleine Chapsal: Review of Passacaglia in L’Express.

ACP: Anthony Cheal Pugh: Introduction to Pinget’s Autour de Mortin. In Methuen's Modern Texts, 1971.

AV: Anne Villelaur: Review of Passacaglia in Les Lettres françaises.

RP: Robert Pinget: Letter to the translator.]

Passacaglia
is as short as anything that Pinget has previously written. But it resumes in an extraordinary way the themes and motifs of his previous work. SB

Passacaglia
is an amusing book, but it is also terrible. MC

The virtuosity of Pinget’s attempts to reconcile the demands of the imagination with those of the intellect is sometimes astonishing, and it is the tension resulting from this continual conflict that produces humor. Pinget plays upon his own scepticism regarding the situations that he invents, so that in all his books, sometimes within the space of a single phrase, the reader is pulled violently in opposite directions. ACP

If we allow ourselves to be caught up by this book, without bothering too much at first about solving its little enigmas,
we
find that these perpetual enigmas make us want to read on, as they do in a detective story. And then we discover a work that goes much farther than all these enigmas put together. Pinget’s tour de force is that, starting from the most concrete elements, he makes us think about the most serious subjects. AV

The object of
Passacaglia
is to exorcise death by magical operations with words. As if the pleasure of playing with the vocabulary could delay the fatal issue
 
…
RP

Passacaglia
perpetually hovers on the edge of nothingness, as the operations of the mechanical universe are called into question: “Something broken in the mechanism.” The “cogito” still confirms existence, but on the edge of an abyss: “Death at the slightest deficiency in thought.” SB

Much of Pinget’s work consists, explicitly or implicitly, of a dramatization of the situation of the artist who no longer believes that conventional fiction is capable of giving real imaginative satisfaction, but who is nevertheless propelled by the need to find a means of projecting his imagination into situations that can better be presented within the novel format than any other. ACP

Pinget is pointing out that in fiction there is no standard of truth, not even a relative one. An original version of an event is not necessarily truer than a subsequent one—and vice versa. ACP

The dimension of Pinget’s work has been that of every novelist: the world in time. But the unerring direction of his language has led him to the end of the world, the end of time. Hence the structural role of his progressive introduction of apocalyptic imagery.

…
 
The act of stopping the clock, which is an initial and recurring motif in
Passacaglia,
suggests the removal of the temporal coordinates of the Newtonian universe. As a result of this act, the God/author is identified not as the efficient cause, whose creation runs like clockwork from the primordial decree, but as the conserving cause, whose constant intervention is indispensable. SB

The return to spoken language and the abandonment of the rhetoric of accepted literary style
 
…
is a feature of all his writing.
 
…
We must adjust our reading technique, if we are to appreciate fully Pinget’s style. This involves retrieving the “childish” habit of allowing the vocal organs to form the unpronounced sounds.
 
…
Moreover, if the reader adopts this mimetic reading technique consciously he will also be able to assume a certain critical distance, or a more sceptical attitude to what he is reading, that will allow him to perceive more readily both the underlying seriousness of the text and the constant element of half-concealed irony. ACP

Don’t bother too much about logic: everything in
Passacaglia
is directed against it. RP

Robert Pinget (1919-1997) was the author of numerous plays, essays, and fourteen novels, including
Someone, The Inquisitor
y,
Baga,
and
Mahu or The Material.
Best known for his association with the Nouveau Roman (New Novel) literary movement, which also included Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, Pinget received a number of awards, including the prestigious Prix Femina for
Someone
and the Prix des Critiques for
The Inquisitory.

“If we can imagine a Faulkner who began with the combative intellectual playfulness of Queneau or Jarry, or a
Sound and the Fury
that ends with everyone dissolved in Benjy’s idiocy, we start to taste Pinget.”

— John Updike,
New Yorker

“It can and should be claimed for Pinget that he has produced a sequence of some twenty books over the past three decades, all of which observe the kind of stringent laws of discourse and development that we associate with the Beckett oeuvre.
 
…
But the comparison with Beckett should not be allowed to mask the fact that this is a wholly original and distinctive achievement.”

— Stephen Bann,
London Review of Books

“The style seems like a combination of Joyce’s stream of consciousness with Burroughs’s cut-and-paste technique.”

—Martin A. David,
Los Angeles Times

“Robert Pinget deserves more readers.”

—John Sturrock,
New York Times

{1}
Original jacket material written for the French edition.