UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Los Angeles

Writing From the Riverbank: Juan Jose Saer and the Nouvecm Roman

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor

of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

By

Nicholas Michael Kramer

2009
 UMI Number: 3357335

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The dissertation of Nicholas Michael Kramer/fc approved.

Michelle Clayton

MariaXMstina Ponsi Gbmmittee Ko-Chair

A Vy

lichael Henry Heim, Committee CotChair

University of California, Los Angeles

2009

n
 DEDICATION

I dedicate this dissertation to my parents. To my father, for your support throughout the
writing process, but especially during the most trying moments when I was developing
the project. To my mother, for instilling in me a fascination with literature, language and
Latin America.

iii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One: Introduction 1

Chapter Two: Uncertainty and the Critique of Humanism: Saer, 39
Jean Ricardou and Alain Robbe-Grillet

Chapter Three: Tropism and Translation: Saer and Nathalie Sarraute 76

Chapter Four: Divergingfromthe Nouveau Roman: Saer and Michel Butor 140

Chapter Five: Unity of Place and Character: Saer and Claude Simon 167

Chapter Six: Conclusion 192

Bibliography 204

IV
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I would like to thank my committee, especially Professor Heim for his steady

guidance, Professor Pons for her thoughtful yet balanced feedback, Professor Clayton for

her rigor and Professor Kaufman for her moral support. The camaraderie and insightful

commentary of my friends were also pivotal to the writing process: Emad Mirmotahari,

Chris Shaw, Kris Pangburn, Eli Kaufman, Michael Cuesta, Claudia Mesa, and Gabriela

Capraroiu. Finally, I wish to thank the Roy and Dorothy John doctoral fellowship which

I received through the International Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles

for the academic year 2007-08. This support was an indispensable resource in my

progression towards the completion of this dissertation.

v
 VITA

December 4,1972 Born, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1996 Bachelor of Arts in English with minor in Philosophy

University of California, Berkeley
2004 Summer travel grant to do research in Argentina from
UCLA Latin American Studies Center

2003 Summer Research Mentorship awardfromUCLA Graduate

Division

2006 Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) award from

UCLA Latin American Studies Center for study of
Portuguese

2007 Roy and Dorothy John Doctoral Fellowship in International

StudiesfromUCLA International Institute

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

2009 "Introducing Juan 3os6 Saer," Simorgh 124 (forthcoming)

2007 Presentation of dissertation in progress at UCLA

Comparative Literature department colloquium
2005 "La pampa argentina y la teoria de la reception: Las nubes
de Juan Jos6 Saer" presented at ler Congreso Regional del
Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana,
Rosario, Argentina

2004 "Conspiratorial Fictions: Don DeLillo's Underworld wad

Ricardo Piglia's La ciudad ausente" presented at American
Comparative Literature Association conference, University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor

VI
 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Writing From the Riverbank: Juan Jose Saer and the Nouveau Roman

By

Nicholas Michael Kramer

Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

University of California, Los Angeles, 2009

Professor Michael Henry Heim, Co-Chair

Professor Maria Cristina Pons, Co-Chair

My dissertation shows how Saer's dialogue with five writers associated with the

nouveau roman—ihe, source of some of the most dynamic and provocative experiments

with the novel taking place in Paris during Saer's time there—functions as a laboratory

and generative site of ideas that make their way into his criticism and fiction. While

other readings of his work locate him in an Argentinian context, my approach breaks new

ground by situating him in a comparative framework. After considering some of the

basic theoretical points of convergence between Saer's writing and the nouveau roman,

in the second chapter I study the relationship between Saer and the work of Alain Robbe-

Grillet and Jean Ricardou according to the question of representation and the critique of

vii
humanism. In the third chapter, I explore the connections between Saer and Nathalie

Sarraute, paying careful attention to Saer's translation of Sarraute's Tropisms, which

provides a window onto his creative process. Finally, I examine the contrast between

Saer and Michel Butor with regard to the question of realism, and the link between Saer,

Claude Simon and William Faulkner with respect to the creation of a unified literary

world set in a marginalized rural locale. Whereas previous studies of post-Boom writers

emphasize how they collapse the boundary between high and popular culture, my reading

of Saer highlights his rigorous work with language and attention to place. This

interpretation calls into question the dominant categories for reading Latin American

writers in Europe and North America.

viii
 Chapter One: Introduction

The work of Juan Jose Saer is distinguished by surreal imagery, references to

films and paintings, descriptions of objects, and a tone of detachment. These elements,

which combine to create a defamiliarizing experience for the reader, can be read in

conjunction with his literary relationship from his earliest to his latest writings with the

nouveau ronton in France. The nouveau rontonfictionand theory was part of the literary

world in which Saer grew up, yet it also presented a language and a theorization of

insights regarding the novel that Argentinian writers in the 1950's and 60's had reached

independently. From his two essays directly on the movement—one from 1968, when he

was beginning to publish, the otherfromafter 2000, at the end of his life—to his

numerous references to it in other essays, to his translations of Robbe-Grillet and

Sarraute, to the presence of the disorienting elements in his fiction, Saer's work cannot be

properly understood without a grasp of the nouveau ronton writers and how he read their

work.

Review of scholarship on Saer

Saer was one of the most innovative and rigorous writers to emergefromLatin

America in the twentieth century, yet outside Argentina his work has yet to receive the

critical attention it deserves. Eminent Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia's comment

provides a sense of Saer's reputation: "To say Saer is the best Argentinian writer today is

unworthy of his work... [He] is one of the best writers working in any language. His

work, like that of Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett, is situated on the other side of

thefrontierin that land of no one else" (Bach 46). As the author of perhaps the most

1
ambitious study yet produced on Saer describes the pattern of critical reception to his

work, "a pesar del lugar que, desde hace pocos anos, Saer ocupa en las librerias,

universidades y medios argentinos, el balance critico de su obra es sorprendentemente

escaso (si se lo compara con, por ejemplo, los estudios dedicados a Puig, a Walsh o a

Cortazar cuando tenia la edad que Saer tiene hoy en dia" (Premat 12). Another

influential critic states "pues, como es sabido, e incluso ha sido seiialado como prueba de

su calidad, fa obra de Juan Jose Saer.. no ha obtenido de la critica una atencion

sistematica que vaya pareja con su densidad y con su rigor" (Gramuglio 262).

The reception to Saer's work can be divided into four periods. In the 1960's and

70's Saer was writing primarily for a small audience of readers, composed largely of his

friends in Argentina. Only in the 1980's, with the publication of novels like Nadie nada

nunca (1980), El entenado (1983), and La ocasion (1986), did an identifiable body of

criticism begin to emerge. Maria Teresa Gramuglio's pioneering study Juan Jose Saer

por Juan Jose Saer (1986), which included her essay "El lugar de Saer" was one of the

first critical works to consider his writing collectively and try to make some broad claims

about it; it remains a valuable resource and contains some of the most lucid descriptions

of the central threads in Saer's oeuvre. Graciela Montaldo's Juan Jose Saer: El limonero

real (1986) was another milestone in this wave of criticism; devoted entirely to this single

novel from 1974 which is well-known in Argentina but almost totally ignored elsewhere,

her study helped to solidify his growing reputation and draw attention to this dense text

about mourning and melancholia which was one of his first mature works.

2
 In the 1990's, criticism on Saer began to expand beyond Argentina, with many

articles focusing on his historical novel El entenado, the detective novel Lapesquisa, and

questions of memory and perception. During this period his novels also began to be

examined in connection withfictionby other Latin American writers on topics like

detectivefictionor the historical novel in Latin America. Only in the twenty first century

has the critical literature started to take shape, with the publication of four book length

studies: Maria Bermudez Martinez's La incertidumbre de lo real: bases de la narrativa

de Juan Jose Saer (2001), Julio Premat's La dicha de saturno: escrituray melancolia en

la obra de Juan Jose Saer (2002), Jorgelina Corbatta's Juan Jose Saer: Arte poetica y

prdctica literaria (2005), and Gabriel Riera's Littoral of the Letter: Saer's Art of

Narration (2006), which stakes the claim on the book jacket to being "the first full-

fledged study in English of the late Argentine writer Juan Jose Saer." Evelia Romano's

lucid and detailed overview in English of Saer's work for the Latin American Writers

Supplement (2002) is a further gesture towards the canonization of his oeuvre. These

valuable works of criticism examine Saerfromdifferent angles, such as melancholia

(Premat), uncertainty (Bermudez Martinez) and ethics (Riera).

The nouveau roman

The term nouveau roman refers to a group of writers in France in the 1950's who

rejected traditional notions of character and plot. They were also sometimes called the

ecole de Minuit, bcole du regard, anti-roman, or chosisme. The nouveau roman writers

were actively involved in many of the most dynamic intellectual debates of their time in

3
France; they wrote essays stating their views on literature and objectives with their

fiction. Responding to Jean Paul Sartre's call for politically committed literature in his

famous essay Qu 'est-ce que la litterature?, they repeatedly asserted the need for

literature to be autonomous rather than the vehicle for a political message or agenda.

While each of the five French writers I connect with Saer undertook a particular

literary project that merits consideration on its own terms, they shared certain concerns

that justify considering them together as part of a movement. True to the label that

describes them, the writers associated with the nouveau ronton were primarily novelists

who sought to reinvigorate a genre they saw as stultified by its failure to develop new

formal techniques. For the nouveaux romanciers, although other artistic genres, like

poetry and painting had moved in new directions, the novel remained mired in a tendency

to repeat the realist framework exemplified in the nineteenth century in French letters by

Balzac. They considered that in painting, the work offiguressuch as Picasso and Miro

had exploded realist conventions and made it impossible to continue to paint in the same

way without taking these discoveries into account. Sarraute's concept of suspicion is

useful here, as she would see the imitation of realist writing as an unthinking and

innocent approach to literature in an age where a more skeptical angle had come about,

the innocence of a prior generation having been supplanted by the suspicion of the mid-

twentieth century moment when she was writing. Similarly, in poetry the work of

Baudelaire, Mallarme and Verlaine had brought about undeniable innovations a hundred

years earlier and as the nouveau roman writers looked around them they saw the

excitement created in cinema by the directors associated with the nouvelle vague, Jean-

4
Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut,1 who in a confrontational and rebellious spirit had

sought to experiment by doing the opposite of many of the most entrenched and

cherished of cinematic techniques or trying shots that had been considered taboo.2 They

noted that while in painting, poetry and film, form had taken precedence, the novel was

expected to emphasize content by telling a story and transmitting a message. With the

emergence of Sartre's Qu 'est-ce que la litterature? the novel was also obligated to

participate in the fight against injustice and the liberation of colonized peoples.

Film was the site of some of the most energetic and dynamic developments taking

place in the arts in France in the 1950's and 60's~at the height of the activity of the

nouveau roman, and during the time when Saer first arrived in Paris. The work of

Godard was perhaps the most remarkable example of the spirit of the nouvelle vague and

its connection with the nouveau roman. Commenting on his Bande apart, Godard states

This movie was made as a reaction against anything that wasn't done. It was
almost pathological or systematic. A wide angle lens isn't used for close-ups?
Let's do it. A hand- held camera isn't used for tracking shots? Let's do it. It went
along with my desire to show that nothing was off-limits. An inquisition like
regime ruled over French cinema. Everything was compartmentalized. It was
difficult for anyone younger than 40 or 50 to make inroads. There were taboos
and laws. And I wanted to show that it all meant nothing. The rules meant
something when they were first invented. But when people began to merely copy
them its like I say.. But it's not about the material, but the way it's handled.
Which at times we felt was terrible. It was about the way people spoke. When
they would leave a room they would say I'm leaving. But when you leave a room
you never say I'm leaving, you say "I'll be back." We had to rebel against little
things like that. We often went overboard but it was necessary tofindthe right
tone... So there were certain myths that we needed to get rid of. I remember very
well the title of the article Truffaut wrote a year before his success at the Cannes
film festival: French cinema is dying under the weight of false myths. The myths

1
Other directors associated with the movement include Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette.
2
See the documentary by Andre S. Labarthe "La Nouvelle vague par elle-meme" (1964).

5
 had to be destroyed for French cinema to be reborn (Labarthe, my transcription
of subtitles).

The parallels between this project and that of the nouveau ronton are striking. By

consciously attacking the established conventions for the novel in France, its practitioners

hoped to break with the past and throw open the doors to innovation a la Godard and

Truffaut. Robbe-Grillet was probably the nouveau roman writer most actively involved

with film. He wrote the screenplay for Alain Renais's L 'Amiee derniere a Marienbad

and directed ninefilms3in his own right. Saer's interest in cinema is exemplified by the

four screenplays that he wrote or co-wrote,4 his agreement to have several of his works

adapted for the screen,5 his work as professor offilmin Argentina and his participation

in a round table discussion offilmwith Julio Cortazar and Augusto Roa Bastos, among

others. His literary circle in Santa Fe was especially influenced by Italian neorealism and

"the visual power of Saer's stories, with their suggestive use of light and shadows and

their insistence on certain colors, shapes and character's gestures, can be associated with

the ItalianfilmmakerMichelangelo Antonioni" (Romano 518). His knowledge of film

history emerges in several of his essays, where he expresses his admiration for the

Brazilian cineaste Glauber Rocha and the adaptation to the screen of Graciliano Ramos's

Vidas secas6 The interest of Robbe-Grillet and Saer infilmis not separatefromtheir

fiction; it is everywhere apparent there, either directly through the use of visual

3
L 'Immortelle, Trans-Europ-Express, L 'Homme qui ment, L 'Eden et apres, Napris les des, Glissements
progressing du plaisir, Le Jeu avec lefeu, La Belle Captive, Un Bruit qui rendfou.
4
Palo y hueso-Bois et os, Las veredas de Saturno, Journal de Patagonie, La Maniere noire (unpublished).
5
Gaitdn, Paloy hueso-Bois et os, and Nadie nada nunca.
6
See "La literatura y los nuevos lenguajes."

6
metaphors or more subtly through engagement with the question of the relationship

between cinema and literature.

To the surprise of the nouveau roman writers, French novelists continued to

produce realist novels in the style of Balzac, as if the modernist revolution had never

occurred. Thus they saw themselves as inheritors of the legacy of the great modernists

and insisted repeatedly that the novel develop in a fashion that take it into account.

Moreover, they called not for imitation of the modernists, but for a conscious effort at

formal innovation in the experimental spirit of the modernists, working to find new

techniques appropriate for the time in which they were living. In short they wanted to see

the same excitement and energy in the arena of the French novel as they saw in painting,

film and poetry.

The most innovative development regarding the genre of the novel in France in

the twentieth century was the existentialism of Camus and Sartre, who had developed a

type of fiction centered on questions of alienation, freedom and absurdity. Sartre was one

of the earliest critics to recognize the greatness of Faulkner and to promote his work.

However, the nouveau roman writers, seeing in Sartre's fiction an expression of his

existentialist philosophy (and especially his argument regarding commitment), rejected it

out of hand. Robbe-Grillet, in "Nature, humanisme et tragedie," regarded Sartre's fiction

as too formally stagnant and exemplary of a wrongheaded humanism. For Robbe-Grillet

Sartre's novels employ a transparent approach to language and view prose fiction as a

genre for transmitting a message rather than experimenting with form. In short, he saw

Sartre'sfiction,not surprisingly, as exemplary of his objectionable theoretical views of

7
the function that the novel should serve. Moreover, in response to Sartre's article

claiming that existentialism is a form of humanism, Robbe-Grillet argued that Sartre

remained mired in a romanticistframeworkthat placed the subject at the center. Robbe-

Grillet and Sarraute based their calls for the discovery of new formal devices on their

claim that the nature of society had changed: while the realist novel was appropriate in an

age where the individual had great power, a new type of novel was needed to express a

world where this was no longer the case.

Painting and cinema were important points of reference for the nouveau roman

writers not only as models of formal evolution, but also as markers of an increasingly

visual world where the very relevance of the novel is called into question. Their

awareness of working in a word-based genre at a time when images were ever more

predominant emerges in their especially active forays into the visualfield,both in and

outside of theirfiction,in an effort to bring their primary area of activity, the novel, into

conversation with visual mediums. Thus their novels brim with references to paintings,

films and photos, and many of them wrote screenplays (Robbe-Grillet) or were painters

(Simon) in their own right. The work of Butor is marked by a particular awareness of the

relationship between space, travel and genre, constantly seeking to blur these boundaries

and find ever more complex forms to express man's relationship to the spatial world.

Saer alsofrequentlydraws on painting metaphors in his work, as in the contrast

between approaches to painting in Glosa, one more spontaneous the other more

premeditated, and the reference to Walter Bueno's father's inability to understand

abstract painting in Lo imhorrahle as a marker of his son's conventional realist aesthetics.

8
He also refers to abstract paintersfromwell-known Europeanfiguressuch as Klee and

Kandinsky7 to lesser known Argentinian ones such as Juan Pablo Renzi,8 and Fernando

Espino,9 whom he recuperates and promotes.

Saer's novels repeatedly stage the scene of their own production in a way that

echoes the concerns of the nouveau ronton. Even novels that seem to be concerned with

other topics return to this central preoccupation: Lapesquisa tells the story of a serial

killer in France, but the question of who authored the discovered text En las tiendas

griegas becomes equally significant; Lo imborrable is the story of a love triangle, but the

aesthetic value of Walter Bueno's novel La brisa en el trigo emerges as perhaps the most

prominent narrative thread; Las mtbes is ostensibly the story of a trip across the pampa to

deliver a group of mental patients to a hospital outside Buenos Aires, but this tale is

inseparablefromthe determination of whether the entire narrative, delivered to Pigeon on

a diskette in Paris, is authentic or not. Thus while the precise characteristics of individual

nouveau ronton writers are not always explicit in his novels, the underlying questions

they engage are strikingly coincident with those of the nouveau ronton.

Saer and the nouveau ronton

Many of the questions that interest Saer are also at the center of the nouveau

ronton. He had reached the same conclusions as they independently of them. Saer wrote

poetry and non-fiction, butfromthe start he had a strong sense of himself as a writer of
7
See "Literature y crisis Argentina."
8
Whose paintings are the cover art for many of Saer's novels.
9
See Saer's contribution to La trama de las apariencias: Lapintura de Fernando Espino (2000).

9
fiction, beginning with his early short stories and moving on to his production of twelve

novels. Faced with a desire to write fiction coupled with the belief that the literary

potential of prior models for the novel had been exhausted, the young Saer was

confronted with the problem of what models to use for his fiction. His readings of

Anglo-American modernists like Joyce and Faulkner had given him some sense of what

could be done, but since Saer was born in 1937 they came from a previous generation.

What Saer finally discovered then in the nouveau ronton was a circle of writers interested

in the novel,10 more or less contemporaneous with him, who had come to similar

conclusions about the genre and who set for themselves a literary project with which he

could identify.

Most of the studies of Saer mention the nouveau ronton, yet in an effort to guard

against the possibility that he be considered a nouveau ronton writer, they underestimate

the importance of this body of writing for his work. Only a few of the articles explore the

topic and the book length studies discuss it only briefly. Myrna Solorotevsky's "'La

Mayor' de Juan Jose Saer y el efecto modelizador del nouveau ronton" (1991) makes a

start towards exploring the connection, but the topic merits more detailed attention. Far

from being limited to "La mayor," Saer's relationship with the nouveau ronton extends to

his entire oeuvre. His engagement with the movement is particularly direct during the

1
° It is not exactly clear to what extent he was aware of the nouveau roman prior to moving to France in
1968 and to what extent he discovers it while there. In any case, there is not any doubt that he becomes
much more exposed to the movement and the debates connected with it through living in France in the late
sixties and seventies.

10
late sixties and early seventies in the years when he moved to France,u but it also

continues throughout his entire writing career.

In two of the recent book length studies on his work,12 the authors devote sections

to reviewing the French new novel but then back awayfromit. Trying to ensure that his

debt to the nouveau roman is not exaggerated, Riera remarks "this does not mean,

however, that this is simply another case of European influence on a Latin American

writer" (Riera, 57). My dissertation reconsiders his relationship with the nouveau roman

to provide a more measured and accurate appraisal of the meaning of these writers for

him, one which neither argues that he is a nouveau roman writer nor repudiates his

complex linkage to the movement, but rather situates him in the middle ground between

the two extremes. I work with both the fiction and the critical essays of Saer and the

nouveau roman writers, in an effort to find the major points of connection between them.

My study foregrounds the transnational and intertextual nature of Saer's artistic

process by showing how his work dialogues with a French literary movement. Studying

Saer in connection with the nouveau roman also provides a way of considering several

interrelated questions, such as commitment, place, translation and the avant-garde.

Without attaching excessive importance to a given national literary tradition or the

geographical circumstances under which Saer wrote—especially given that his interest in

the nouveau roman preceded his move rather than growing out of it—this approach

provides an opportunity for considering his having taken up residence in France for over

1
' His translation of Sarraute's text is published in 1968 and hisfirstessay entirely devoted to the nouveau
roman dates from 1972.
12
See Riera and Bermudez Martinez.

11
half of his life, a biographical fact thatfindsits way into hisfictionand places Argentina

and France into dialogue: in Lapesquisa a French story is brought to Argentina while in

Las nubes an Argentine story is brought to France (Romano).

While he identifies a number of other writers who shaped his approach to

literature, the nouveau ronton is the sole literary movement to which Saer links his work.

My study thus connects Saer's work with a group of writers who constitute a movement

with a common unifying aesthetic philosophy. Saer was especially interested in the

concept of a literary movement or circles who discussed literary questions, making the

process into a dialogue and possible source of camaraderie—even through disagreement.

His association with the Grupo Adverbio in Argentina in the 1950's (Romano) is one

example of his involvement with a literary circle. Indeed, for many of Saer's characters

this type of interaction is the only avenue of connection with others. The discussions of

literature betweenfriendsthroughout hisfictiontestifies to this point, as does the

exploration of thefictionalprecisionismo movement in hisfinalnovel La grande. The

work of Roberto Bolafio—another post-Boom Southern Cone writer whosefictioncan be

profitably connected with Saer's—is also marked by this tendency; Los detectives

salvajes and Estrella distante are two prime examples. The contrast between a literary

movement and a writer working in isolation mirrors the question of the dialogue between

individual and society in Saer's work.

The dissertation considers several overlooked texts in Saer's oeuvre and the

nouveau ronton. While the majority of articles in the criticism cluster around his El

entenado and Lapesquisa, to the point that his entire output is often reduced to this single

12
work, I take into account Lo imborrable and Nadie nada nunca. I also examine the

whole range of his critical essays. Finally, in chapters two and three, I consider Saer's

translations of texts by Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, which have been almost entirely

excluded from studies done up to the present time. Additionally, while the popular view

of the nouveau ronton associates it almost exclusively with the work of Robbe-Grillet, I

consider four other writers given short shrift in more limited discussions of the

movement.

I examine Saer's literary and critical relationship with five majorfiguresfromthe

nouveau ronton. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Ricardou, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor

and Claude Simon. I conceive of the nouveau ronton in the more narrow sense that

includes these majorfigureswho congregated in Paris. Although Samuel Beckett and

Marguerite Duras were major literaryfiguressometimes linked to the nouveau ronton, I

exclude them here since they were not as actively involved in the debates and Saer refers

to them infrequently. In a prominent study that defines the members of the group,13 Jean

Ricardou includes Claude Oilier and Robert Pinget; however I do not consider them here

for the same reasons.

To lay the foundation for the discussion of individualfiguresfromthe movement

in subsequent chapters, the chapter summarizes the basic points of the nouveau ronton as

a group and— in order to demonstrate how the connection between Saer and the nouveau

ronton inserts itself into a broader debate—reviews how it has been received in Latin

America. The question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics is at the center

13
Le nouveau roman

13
of the Saer-nouveau ronton connection. To establish a lineage that frames Saer's

engagement with this topic, the chapter then situates his work in three interrelated

debates: the Boedo/Florida polemic in Argentina in the 1920's, the discussion of realism

in Argentina and Europe, and the dispute over commitment. Finally, by way of inserting

Saer into contemporary debates about world literature and to illustrate how his writing

subverts the category of the nation—both at the political and literary levels;—without

either creating a facile celebration of transnational connections, the chapter uses as a tool

Pascale Casanova's concept from The World Republic ofLetters of the international

writer.

Two Opposed Paradigms: The Boom and the Nouveau Roman

Saer rejects the writers associated with the Boom as a precedent for innovations in

the novel and instead looks to the nouveau ronton, in a deliberately confrontational

gesture. In "La novela" he states "si se observa el panorama literario posterior a 1960, se

comprueba que tanto a nivel teorico como practico el unico aporte decisivo es el del

Nouveau Roman" (Saer 122). His use of the 1960's to highlight the importance of the

nouveau ronton is telling, since the emergence of the Boom writers in Latin America is

typically associated with the period. For a Latin American writer to argue that the most

decisive precedent for the novel at both the theoretical and practical level after 1960 is

the French new novel is a conscious affront to the writers associated with the Boom,

emphasized especially by the absence of a reference to them. Furthermore the care he

takes to specify that his claim holds not just at the level of theory but also at the level of

14
fiction highlights his view that the nouveau roman fiction is just as innovative as its

theory. If we were inclined to believe that Saer's claim was that the French new novel

was revolutionary only on the theoretical level, leaving open the possibility that he would

be implying that the Boom novels are the most decisive precedent after 1960 on the level

offiction,his precise language disabuses us of this notion. This interpretation is

consistent with the criticisms Saer makes of Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia

Marquez,14 which emerge at several points in his writings.15 By contrast his open

admiration for the writers associated with the nouveau roman is everywhere apparent.

The ambitious nature of the novels associated with the Boom is one of the main

reasons why Saer repudiates them. The minute analysis and narrow focus of the nouveau

roman novels present a striking contrast with the length and scale of the Boom novels.

While the Boom novels make an effort to encompass national or even continental ideals,

the nouveaux romans are considerably more focused. One of the many innovations of the

movement was the drastic reduction in size and scope of the novels (Jefferson). As

opposed to Balzac's ambitious realist novels that attempted to document all of French

society, the nouveaux romans document interior states of mind, or small moments in the

daily lives of the characters. Again, this notion, which is connected with the theoretical

critique of mastemarratives,16 is relevant to Saer's works, which are often sustained by

the intensity of the language and inquiry into philosophical questions rather than the plot

14
He rarely references Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes, two of the other majorfiguresassociated with the
Boom.
15
See "El mundo transfigurado."
16
See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

15
or the characters. The nouveau roman thus provides a literary strategy that Saer employs

to critique the totalizing novels of the Latin American Boom. Further, his awareness of

the question of size and scope is signaled by the title of his final novel La grande, which

at 435 pages is by far his most ambitious work, even in the unfinished form in which it

was published posthumously. The title functions as an ironic wink to the reader, where

Saer indicates his intentional effort to write a more ambitious text, which at the same time

parodies this very undertaking. Saer's localized project set in the litoral region of

Argentina can also be read as a geographical analogue to the attenuated and detailed

focus of the nouveau roman novels.

The tradition of the objectivist novel in Argentina

The kinship Saer felt with the nouveau roman can also be situated within the

broader context of Argentine letters. In several places Saer asserts that certain Argentine

writers were employing techniques later associated with the French new novelists prior to

the heyday of that movement and the Argentines came to similar conclusions about the

same questions independently of their French counterparts: "no olvidemos que Antonio

Di Benedetto, a mediados de los aiios 50 ya habia escrito textos 'objetivistas,'17 sin tener

la menor idea del nouveau roman. Me aventuraria a decir.. .que, teniendo los mismos

clasicos, las conclusiones que extrajeramos debian ser mas o menos semejantes"

(Saavedra 177). For Saer the independent arrival in France and Argentina of similar
17
The terms "objetivismo" or "objetivistas" are common ways of referring to the nouveau roman in
Spanish. These labels further refer to the tendency among the writers associated with the movement,
especially Robbe-Grillet, to employ detailed descriptions of objects in a way that emphasizes their
independence from human consciousness and refrainsfromthe projection onto them of transcendental
qualities.

16
literary conclusions is a natural development. Furthermore, in his article on "Zama,"

Saer states: "Se trata, veinte anos antes que la retorica del Nouveau Roman la clasificara

como uno de sus procedimientos mas corrientes, de una variante de la mise en abyme que

Gide describe en su diario, en una pagina de 1893 (Saer 48)". For Saer the work of Di

Benedetto can be inscribed within a small grouping of textsfromArgentinian literature

that anticipate the innovations of the French new novel. Saer thus reads the nouveau

ronton not as a stunning development that emerged ex nihilo but as a set of literary

techniques and a theory of the novel that had been anticipated even within several little

known works in Argentinian letters. According to this reading Saer's interest in the

nouveau ronton is not the result of the influence on him of a particularly French or

European literary development but part of a broader pattern of literary conclusions that

transcend national boundaries while at the same time having a precedent within his own

national literary tradition. He correctly identifies the mise en abyme as one of the

techniques that distinguish the work of the nouveaux romanciers and he also employs it

in his own fiction. Moreover, several stories by Di Benedetto could be considered

objectivist as well as the novel Sin embargo Juan vivia by Alberto Vanasco in 1947. The

introduction to Di Benedetto's text by Noe Jitrik and to Di Benedetto's stories by Martin

Kohan, two major voices in the world of Argentinian literary criticism, give authority to

Saer's reading of them as precursors to the new novel. They show that Saer's interest in

the nouveau ronton does not stem exclusively from his interest in the work by these

writers in and of themselves, but alsofromthe aesthetic positions which he and other

17
Argentine writers had worked out independently of, and in certain cases prior to, the

French nouveaux romanciers.

To consider Saer's work in relation to the nouveau roman would seem to provide

merely yet another reading of the influence of a European literary movement on a Latin

American writer (Riera). However, for Saer the new novel writers were not an

exceptional example of literary experimentation; they were part of a broader,

transnational group of writers constituting an avant-garde tradition. In a narrow sense, in

terms of the genre of the novel, his approach makes the novels associated with the

nouveau roman part of a tradition that would include works like Macedonio Fernandez's

Museo de la novela de la eterna, for which Saer expressed admiration18 as well as the

aforementioned textsfromArgentina by Di Benedetto and Vanasco. Yet in a broader

sense Saer conceived of the nouveau roman as part of a tradition of avant-garde writing

that encompassed poetry and prose, thus including Latin American avant-garde poets

such as Neruda, Vallejo, Girondo and Huidobro. Finally, he also gestured towards an

interdisciplinary avant-garde tradition that would extend tofilmmakerssuch as

Michelangelo Antonioni and painters such as Klee, and the Argentinians Juan Pablo

Renzi and Fernando Espino.19

In a key essay called "Literatura y crisis argentina" he set up an opposition

between "literatura oficial" and "verdadera literatura." The practitioners of the former

occupy a dominant position, while the ones who produce "verdadera literatura" operate

18
See "La selva espesa de lo real."
19
See "Vanguardia y narraci6a"

18
from the margins, even if their work becomes commercially successful. These categories

could be connected to the distinction Pascale Casanova draws between national and

international writers, the latter producing texts that have validity in a broader literary

sense and are not reducible to national or political readings. For Saer the national was

always linked to the category of "literatura oficial," while the "verdadera literatura" is

international. "Verdadera literatura" must resist conventional categories, as do the

nouveaux romans.

In almost all his commentaries about the nouveau roman writers Saer discussed

their innovations in terms of the ways they go against the tendencies of the marketplace,

particularly in the area of literature. For example, in the opening line of the translator's

introduction to his translation of Sarraute's Tropismes, he remarked, "El estilo peculiar de

Nathalie Sarraute... se aleja de las leyes de la sintaxis, tal como la entienden los amigos

del 'buen decir' y quienes han hecho de la 'prosa elegante' una profesion altamente

remunerada" (Saer 7). He opposed Sarraute's dense prose to the ideal of stylistic beauty,

which he associated with commercial success. In "La doble longevidad del narrador

Robbe-Grillet," Saer compared the vagaries of a marketplace driven by trends and

fashions with the emergence of two new works by Robbe-Grillet, which he saw as

marking a more substantial literary event (Saer 117-8). His linking of the nouveau roman

to the question of the relationship between literature and society emerged not just in the

reception of these texts, but also within the texts themselves, as I will explore in future

chapters. He was also particularly attuned to the resistance that the nouveau roman had

generated, in a tone that sounds like he sees this reaction as the proof that these writers

19
have accomplished their purpose; to have stirred up debate was for Saer a sign of having

hit a nerve, which he regarded as producing productive tension.

Reception of the nouveau ronton

The nouveau roman has proved to be a controversial chapter of French literature,

inspiring strong responses from critics. Whether for or against, the critical reception of

the movement has tended to be extreme, and more measured reactions are rare. The

criticisms of the movement crystallize around claims that it is elitist, apolitical, and cold.

For the (perceived or real) polemical and radical nature of its postulates, the nouveau

roman is an intellectual battleground. Considering the confrontational and impassioned

tone of his own stances on a variety of literary and philosophical subjects, it makes sense

that Saer throws himself into the debates over the nouveau roman as an advocate of the

movement, since hefrequentlylocates himself as a defender of a maligned or

underappreciated writer.

While the writers associated with the Boom were widely celebrated within Latin

American, the innovations of the nouveau roman writers were adopted only by a small

number of disparate authors working in Spanish. Saer's early attraction to Borges and

the French objectivist novel were atypical for a Latin American writer of his generation:

Para terminar con este recorridofragmentarioy parcial de una obra en marcha,

algo mas sobre las "infiuencias" y sus efectos. Borges y el objetivismo frances
son, en la narrativa de Saer, dos de las mas significativas... .Dos elecciones
atipicas, a contrapelo de las tendencias dominantes y de las expectativas del
nuevo publico lector. Si Borges, a partir de un conjunto de transformaciones que
cristalizaron a mediados de la deeada del sesenta paso a ocupar un lugar rector en
el sistema literario, no ocurrio lo mismo con el objetivismo, que suscito gran
atencion critica pero provoco rechazos bastante notorios, y solo fue incorporado

20
 por algunos autores dispersos que, aunque contemporaneos del boom,
permanecieron al margen de sus resultados mas espectaculares de difusion
(Gramuglio 296-7).

The marginal place of the nouveau ronton in Latin American literature is reflected in the

opposition of major figures such as Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez, and Ernesto Sabato.

It establishes the aforementioned tension between two rival tendencies, the Boom and the

nouveau ronton. From the outset, Saer worked against the grain of the prevailing literary

trends of his time and in his literary tradition.

Saer's alliance with the nouveau ronton is thus illustrative of his divergence from

the dominant currents in the Latin American novel in the 1960's. The responses to the

nouveau ronton of Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez and Sabato demonstrate the

predominant view among Latin American writers. Both Saer and Vargas Llosa lived in

Paris during the 1960's, and the strongly contrasting views they had of the nouveau

ronton are indicative of the broader differences between their respective literary goals.

Saer does not mention Vargas Llosa often, but when he does it is to criticize his work:

"me gustan escritores de derecha como Celine o Borges No es el caso de Vargas Llosa,

porque sus formas literarias me parecen vetustas, no porque sea un escritor de derecha"

(Alvarez 41). Saer emphasizes that his dislike for Vargas Llosa stems not so much from

his political views asfromhis literary techniques. A look at the divergent literary

lineages that these two writers select further explains the differences between them and

Saer's open criticism Although they were writing in the same period and attempting to

find new possibilities for the Latin American novel, Vargas Llosa roundly rejected the

nouveau ronton (Castro-Klaren) while Saer saw it as the primary source of innovation in

21
the novel genre during the second half of the twentieth century. Whereas Vargas Llosa's

ambitious novels such as La casa verde and La guerra delfindel mundo make national

claims and refer clearly to specific social, political and historical events, Saer steers clear

of totalizing masternarratives and produces novels that are more difficult to connect to a

referent.

Vargas Llosa's position with respect to the nouveau ronton is representative rather

than exceptional among his generation of Latin American writers. Garcia Marquez

creates a literary oeuvre as opposed to the values of the nouveau ronton as Vargas Llosa

(Bell-Villada) Similarly, Ernesto Sabato criticizes Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet for what

he considers the contradictions inherent in their positions and their arrogance and

pretentiousness. He takes Sarraute to task in "El extrano caso de Nathalie Sarraute

(1963) for the contradictions he sees between herfictionand her assertions in "L'Ere de

Soupcon." In "Lo subjetivo y lo objectivo en el arte" he condemns Robbe-Grillet for his

attack on metaphor andfigurativelanguage: "La furia antimetaforica de Robbe-Grillet, su

idea de que el lenguajefiguradoes ilegitimo, solo pueden explicarse por su incoherencia

filosofica y su desatada arrogancia" (Sabato 69-70) While in a later article (2002) he

qualifies these statements,20 his fundamental skepticism of the nouveau ronton is clear.

The rejection by these writers of the principles of the nouveau ronton is consistent with

an alternative literary paradigm, one which is more closely linked to the Sartrean

"Si bien el Nouveau Roman no produjo ningun gran escritor.. .revelo interesantes narradores, entre ellos
y score todo Robbe-Grillet, el mas original del grupo. En aquel ensayo de "Sur" no negue sus meiitos
literarios ni los de Nathalie Sarraute, sino sus pretensionesfilosoficas,el absolutismo y arrogancia de sus
dictamenes, el insolente terrorismo de sus ensayos, la confusion y las contradicciones de la doctrina"
(Sabato 9).

22
argument regarding commitment and endorses the potential for the novel to make broader

claims.

By contrast, Saer forged a lifelong relationship with the nouveau ronton. His

translations into Spanish ofRobbe-Grillet's "La Plage" (1967) and Nathalie Sarraute's

Tropismes (1968), and essays "Notas sobre el Nouveau Roman" (1972) and "La doble

longevidad del narrador Robbe-Grillet" (2000-2005) establish the persistence of his

interest in these writers and the questions that concerned them. He frequently evokes the

nouveau roman even in essays that are not explicitly about it; his essay "La novela" is

one example, and "La novela y la critica sociologica" essentially amounts to a refutation

of Lucien Goldmann's sociological interpretation of the nouveau roman.

Saer employs the techniques of the nouveau roman to create works distinct from

the broader current of Latin American literature of the mid- twentieth century outlined

above. His comments in the seminal essay, "Una literatura sin atributos" (1980) apply

some of the positions of Robbe-Grillet and other nouveaux romanciers to questions of

interest to Latin American literature to forge a paradigm that challenges the expectations

placed on the Latin American writer by Europe and North America. The idea of

undermining the reader's expectations, thefirmbelief that a work of literature cannot be

made to represent a certain ideological position, the emphasis on form, the idea that a text

may be implicitly political through its structure, thefiercecritique of the

commercialization of literature, are all common to both Saer and the nouveau roman.

23
 Three debates on Aesthetics and Politics

The question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics is of central

importance to Saer's work and the nouveau ronton. The position he takes on these issues

inserts itself into several interconnected debates: the Boedo/Florida polemic in Argentina

in the 1920's, the discussion regarding realism, and the dialogue over the question of

commitment between Sartre and the nouveau ronton writers.

While the terms of the debate eventually became more complex, the

Boedo/Florida distinction that emerged in the 1920's in Buenos Aires originally

established the parameters of the discussion of aesthetics and politics in Argentine letters.

The Florida group (also called the "grupo Martin Fierro") exemplified an art for art's

sake position and was linked to a wealthier part of the city. The leading figures

associated with the group, including Oliverio Girondo, Ricardo Guiraldes and Leopold©

Marechal, expressed their views in the journals Proa and Martin Fierro. By contrast, the

Boedo group emphasi2ed realism and literature with social content, and were identified

with a working class section of the metropolis. Writers such as Elias Castelnuovo, Cesar

Tiempo, Nicolas Olivari and Roberto Mariani wrote articles for Dinamo, Extrema

Izquierda, and Los Pensadores. Borges wrote articles for Martin Fierro, but refrained

from officially affiliating himself with the Florida group. Roberto Arlt similarly

remained neutral. By the 1930's criticisms by Borges, Girondo and Castelnuovo had

largely discredited the binary terms of the debate between the two groups. Nevertheless

it remains a decisive early precedent in Argentine literary debates regarding the

24
aesthetics/politics question: "Para mal o para bien, todos se entremetieron con las

borrascas de su tiempo. Boedo es sin duda el origen de toda la literatura de izquierda en

la Argentina. Florida es la elegancia del desden pero el ingenio desbordado, el talento"

(Feinmann 1). Saer takes up the distinction in "Literatura y crisis Argentina:" "la tesis de

David Vinas segun la cual habria das tradiciones en la literatura argentina, una estetizante

y otra comprometida, que es sin duda erronea o incompleta, tiene sin embargo la ventaja

de instaurar la diversidad donde habia estado reinando, imperioso, lo unico" (101). Like

Borges, Saer views the breakdown of Argentine letters into two camps, one

aestheticizing, the other politically committed, as reductive.

The second of these three sets of debates best establishes the context for Saer's

work, especially since he came of age at a time when realism was one of the most hotly

debated topics in Argentine literary circles. The realist tradition established in

Argentinian literature at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth

centuries by Eugenio Cambaceres and carried on by figures like Benito Lynch, Manuel

Galvez and Roberto Payro remained the dominant current in the novel well into the

twentieth century. The awarding of an international literary prize to a novel by Ciro

Alegria and an Argentinian one to a novel by Bernardo Verbitsky in 1941 (Avellaneda),

as well as the theorization and practice of socialist realism by the "generation de 1945"

further consolidated the hegemony of realism. Even though Borges andfigureslike

Eduardo Mallea, Manuel Mujica Lainez and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada presented

challenges to realism, the writers who congregated around the journal "Contorno" and

were led by David Vinas took up this mantle as the century progressed, emphasizing

25
political commitment and the need to bear witness to the realities of the moment they

were living. Only in the 1960's, with the recuperation of the highly experimental work of

Macedonio Fernandezfromthe 1920's did this situation begin to change slowly. The

publication in 1963 of Rayuela by Julio Cortazar, a work that owed much to Fernandez,

contributed greatly to opening a new space for the Argentinian novel. By the 1980's a

group collectively referred to as the "neovanguardistas" had begun to present a serious

challenge to the dominant paradigm in prose fiction in Argentina. Writers like Ricardo

Piglia, Juan Carlos Martini, Alberto Vanasco, Luis Gusman, Nestor Sanchez, Osvaldo

Lamborghini, Cesar Aira, began to produce novels that undermined this precedent

(Bermudez Martinez). While his earliest novels, like Responso and La vuelta completa

were somewhat more realist in nature, the work of Saer can be inscribed within this neo-

avant-garde narrative tradition, especially beginning with the publication of Cicatrices in

1969. This brief overview of the history of the novel in twentieth century Argentinian

literature is meant to show what Saer and the writers of his generation who shared his

aesthetic were up against: the realist paradigm that began all the way back in the

nineteenth century was tremendously persistent. Against this background, the nouveau

ronton paradigm, which was largely centered on an attack against the persistence of the

realist model of Balzac in the French novel, was especially attractive to Saer.

Similar issues were being debated in a broader context that considered realism

and modernism by Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht.

While Lukacs endorsed the novels of Thomas Mann as the embodiment of a social

realism he saw as a powerful critique of capitalism and rejected modernist texts, such as

26
those of Beckett and Musil, as decadent and lacking in content, Bloch, Adorno and

Brecht set out to defend the latter, striving to show how they too could serve as resistance

to capitalism.

Saer's insistence on the autonomy of literature is more in line with the tack taken

by Adorno, Bloch and Brecht, and his essay on sociological criticism, where he directs

his attacks specifically at Lucien Goldmann's readings of Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau

roman, can also be read as a criticism of Lukacs' arguments regarding modernism and

realism, since Goldmann's ideas have much in common with Lukacs' The meaning of

contemporary realism. As Frederic Jameson puts it, "Lukacsian realism can be said to

give aid and comfort to a documentary and sociological approach to literature which is

correctly enough felt to be antagonistic to more recent methods of construing the

narrative text as afreeplay of signifiers" (204). Lukacs' approach is consistent with the

sociological interpretations of literature that Saer is criticizing in his essay. Moreover,

Saer's point about how sociological interpretations of literature tend to neglect the

individuality of texts and impose a preconceived system of thought upon them rather than

read them on their own terms is one of the key criticisms that has been leveled against

Lukacs. This position corresponded to the predominant view among Saer's literary circle

in Santa Fe. Led by Entre Rios poet Juan L. Ortiz, they "nourished a conception of

literature as an autonomous enterprise, ruled only by its own internal laws and

unencumbered by political or aesthetic dogmas, literary trends, or market demands"

(Romano 518).

27
 The question of realism and modernism is inextricably linked to the discussion

regarding commitment, the third debate whichframesSaer's intervention into the

relationship between aesthetics and politics. Given the literary and political climate in

France and Latin America in thefiftiesand sixties, that is after the publication of Sartre's

Qu 'est-ce que la litterature? in 1948, prose writers were obliged to respond. I will begin

by looking at Jean Paul Sartre's argument in favor of commitment, then move on to a

discussion of the responses by Barthes and Adorno to Sartre's claims, which will in turn

serve as a foundation for an examination of the positions taken by Robbe-Grillet and

Saer.

Since Qu 'est-ce que la litterature? the idea of the ethical obligation of the prose

writer has become synonymous with Sartre's name. He was not thefirstto explore the

question of commitment or to take this position on it, but the eloquence and detail of his

argument has made this text a particularly influential point of reference on the topic.

The work was published when tensions over French colonization in Africa and Asia were

increasing, and the struggles there informed his philosophical position.

While Qu 'est-ce que la litterature? wasfirstpublished in France, it quickly

reached Latin America, where it was generally received enthusiastically. Although

Saer's work dialogues with Sartre in many ways, he rejected his call for litterature

engagee and sided instead with the nouveau roman writers, who took the position that

literature must befreefromthe obligation to be political. Indeed, it was one of the tenets

that unified them. Perhaps the clearest formulation of the idea is to be found in Robbe-

Grillet's essay "Sur quelques notions perimees," where he argues that commitment is an

28
antiquated idea. Saer's formulations appear in "La selva espesa de lo real," where he

refuses to endorse the idea of literature as a tool of social change subservient to an

ideological position determined prior to the act of writing, and in "Una literatura sin

atributos," where he expresses the same argument with regard to the expectations of the

Latin American writer.

The rejection of commitment has led some to charge the nouveaux romanciers

with being apolitical; yet the explicit manner and intensity with which they adhere to this

stance reveals a strong ideological position. Rather than shirking politics, they are

motivated by a belief that literature cannot be a means to an end, but must be an end in

itself. As Saer puts the point, "esta position, que puede parecer estetizante, es al

contrario eminentemente politica" (Saer 282).

Yet Saer and the nouveau ronton writers argue at the same time that a novel that is

not explicitly political can still have political implications. Roland Barthes' Le degre

zero de Vecriture (1953) emerges as one of the earliest and most influential articulations

of this argument and becomes a key theoretical text for the nouveaux romanciers. Sartre

distinguishes between poetry and prose, and goes on to use this distinction to argue that

the quality of the language chosen confers a political obligation upon the prose writer. In

response, Barthes distinguishes between language, style, and writing, ecriture. This latter

term is the critical one in Barthes' response to Sartre, allowing him to demonstrate how

experimental prose that reflects upon the nature of language can have a subversive

dimension.

29
 While Saer does not mention himfrequentlyby name,21 Barthes informs his

position on the question of commitment. Saer clearly associates different forms of

writing with certain political positions. For example, in Lo imborrable (1992), Walter

Bueno, the author of the popular yet aesthetically conservative novel La brisa en el trigo

is represented as complicit with the military dictatorship during 1976-83 in Argentina:

"El libro es tan insigniflcante que no hubiese valido la pena ocuparse de el, si Waltercito

no se hubiese convertido en el escritor oficial, y en su trabajo de periodista, en

propagandista de la dictadura" (24). In Saer's fiction aesthetic positions are frequently

linked to political ones. To write a realist novel in the late twentieth century is a choice

that has an ideological implication, as does the decision to invent new literary forms.

Saer stated his project of writing prose with the greatest degree of condensation

possible and poetry with the greatest degree of distribution possible (Saavedra), reversing

the traditional meanings attached to each type of writing. We can read Saer's original

theory of the relationship between prose and poetry as a response to Sartre's theory from

Que ce-que la litterature? If Sartre's call for the prose writer to produce politically

committed writing is grounded in his distinction between prose and poetry, Saer responds

by creating a theory that blurs the boundary between prose and poetry.

Theodor Adorno takes a different tack in responding to Sartre's arguments.

While Barthes takes on Sartre by challenging his distinction between prose and poetry,

Adorno distinguishes between the writer's intention and the text that he creates,

suggesting the latter take precedence. Furthermore, he argues that committed works do

21
Except to say in an interview that one of the reasons he remained in Paris after the end of his scholarship
was that his wife at the time, Mimi Caterano, was studying personally with Barthes (Alvarez).

30
not accomplish their stated purpose, while supposedly autonomous works are never free

from the influence of reality. Using the examples of Kafka and Beckett, Adorao argues

that the work that is supposedly autonomous is simultaneously political.

Saer's challenge to the concept of litterature engagee drawsfromboth Barthes

and Adomo. The distinction he draws in essays like "Literature y crisis argentina"

between "literature oficial" and "verdadera literature" recalls Barthes's position by

suggesting not only that experimental writing can have a subversive dimension but that it

is the medium par excellence for it. At the same time his claim thatfictionalways

supersedes theory22 recalls Adomo's distinction between intentions and results.

Saer as International Writer

Saer' theoretical writings reveal his interest in the related questions of audience,

reception and circulation of texts. His connection with the nouveau ronton serves to

highlight that he has two audiences; he is both an expatriate in France writing back to his

readers in the home country as someone who has absorbed French literary culture in a

way to open up new possibilities for Argentine writers, and an Argentine writer who

writes for the French public, seeking to challenge certain of the preconceived notions

they may have about Latin American literature.

In two key essays that read like manifestos, "La selva espesa de lo real" (1979)

and "Una literature sin atributos" (1980), Saer expresses his fundamental ideas about

Latin American literature and the way it has been received in Europe. In the first, he

22
"Debemos juzgar a los narradores por sus narraciones, no por sus teorias. Y se pueden escribir buenas
narraciones aim sustentando teorias erroneas" (Saer 178).

31
takes aim at the tendency in European criticism to interpret works of Latin American

literature for their singular Latin American content, leading to readings based on

preconceived ideas. If a work does not conform to these expectations it runs the risk of

being judged inauthentic and falsely European. Certain themes are regarded as the

exclusive domain of European writers, while others are distinctly Latin American. The

majority of Latin American writers have internalized these views, if inadvertently, and

thus produce works that conform to them.

He identifies three principal threats to Latin American literature:first,presenting

itself as Latin American, second, "vitalismo" (Saer 261), a supposedly privileged

relationship with nature, and third "voluntarismo" (262), the idea that literature can be a

direct tool of social change. He considers all three to be mistaken and problematic. In a

gesture that undermines both Latin American and national specificity, he closes by

claiming that all writers live in the same country, "la selva espesa de lo real" (263);

regardless of nationality or place of origin, all writers are engaged in the same difficult

enterprise marked by uncertainty.

In "Una literature sin atributos," he claims that the phrase "Latin American

literature" has become associated with a series of values like aesthetic innocence,

primitivism and political commitment. Complying with the expectations of both the

reading public and the marketplace, the majority of Latin American writers fall into the

trap and produce texts that contain precisely these qualities. Latin American texts are

thus expected to fulfill an ideological rather than an aesthetic purpose. Many of the

greatest Latin American writers of the twentieth century are almost completely unknown

32
in Europe and misunderstood in Latin America. They are marked by difference rather

than similarity and the only quality that unifies them is the effort to construct a highly

personalized vision that erases and takes the place of their creator, resulting in an effect

of universality. These secret works elude the grasp of the marketplace and can be

understood through love and admiration. Every writer thus must refuse to represent

ideological interests and discover his own personal aesthetic, even if it condemns him to

marginality and obscurity.

By dialoguing with the nouveaux romanciers, adopting some of their techniques

and adapting them to his own purposes, and highlighting the continuity between their

conclusions and those of writers working independently in Argentina, Saer problematizes

the expectation by the European reading public that as a Latin American writer he should

treat certain distinctly Latin American themes while undercutting their tendency to treat

such an approach as falsely European. The connection between Saer and the nouveau

roman can thus be inscribed in the context of contemporary theoretical debates about the

place of Latin American literature after the Boom.

Saer's recuperation of the nouveau roman is thus not an incidental part of his

work, but a conscious gesture aimed at complicating European expectations of Latin

American literature. If the European readership expects aesthetic innocence and magical

realism, by employing techniques associated with the nouveau roman in his novels, Saer

upsets their pre-established categories. In addition to using literary devices associated

with the French new novel, by translating them and invoking them repeatedly in his

33
essays, Saer draws attention to his recuperation of their innovations, emphasizing his

open defiance of the traditional pigeonholing of Latin American texts.

In "Conjectures on World Literature," Franco Moretti argues that one way to

think of the raison d'etre of the discipline of Comparative Literature is "to be a thorn in

the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures" (Moretti 68). We

might apply a similar idea to the work of Saer, since much of it rests on an opposition to

an established paradigm, institution or form of writing. In his criticism Saer repeatedly

challenges the study of literature in terms of national categories: "definir la literatura en

relation con el termino 'nation' o con alguno de sus derivados no corresponde a ninguna

realidad y en cambio presenta el inconveniente de crear toda una serie de confusiones"

(Saer 101). Implicit in his stance is the idea that an attack on the category of national

literature is also a way of undermining nationalism. His entire oeuvre is an excellent

example of Pascale Casanova's argument in The World Republic ofLetters that "there

exists a 'literature-world', a literary universe relatively independent of the everyday

world and its political divisions, whose boundaries and operational laws are not reducible

to those of ordinary political space" (Casanova xii).

Casanova's claim postulating the existence of a world of literary relations that

operates on its own terms and cannot be reduced to political considerations or national

boundaries echoes Saer's basic take on literature. The distinction she draws between

national writers, "who embody a national or popular definition of literature" and

international writers, "who uphold an autonomous conception of literature" (Casanova,

34
108), is a valuable tool for approaching Saer's view. By this standard Saer is an

international writer par excellence.

In the Latin American regionalistfictionof the nineteen twenties the novel was a

privileged genre for making claims about the nation. Jose Eustasio Rivera in La vordgine

(Colombia), Romulo Gallegos in Dona Barbara (Venezuela), and Ricardo Guiraldes in

Don segundo sombra (Argentina), all employ the novel to make arguments about the

distinctiveness of their respective nations. The boom writers rejected the premise of

verisimilitude that these novels were founded upon. The linguistic play and the various

possible reading paths of Cortazar's Rqyuela, for example, present a radically different

paradigm in the Latin American novel. Insofar as Saer also endorses the fundamental

aesthetic principles of Macedonio Fernandez that were the model for thefigureof Morelli

in Rayuela, we can read him as continuing a line that passes through Cortazar. By

writing open-ended novels that are marked by uncertainty Saer calls into question the

validity of the category of the nation; his critique of the concept of national literatures is

part of this undertaking.

Chapter Outline

In the second chapter I study the relationship between Saer and the work of Alain

Robbe-Grillet and Jean Ricardou according to the question of representation and the

critique of humanism. I consider Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou together since they

represent the more radically anti-representational wing of the nouveau ronton and, as the

two most visible and outspoken members of the group, worked to consolidate its status as

35
a unified entity. Thefirstsection demonstrates how Saer takes issue with Ricardou to

show how his own stance preserves a view of language as inherently representational.

The remainder of the chapter is devoted to the connection between Saer and Robbe-

Grillet. The first section discusses some of the major points of connection between the

theoretical writings of Saer and Robbe-Grillet. The next section considers Robbe-

Grillet's Les gommes and Saer's Nadie nada mmca as examples of what I call the anti-

humanist detective novel, and the final section pairs Robbe-Grillet's Le voyeur with

Saer's La pesquisa in terms of how they employ a principle of uncertainty. The

elements in Saer's work that are traceable to Robbe-Grillet—such as the opposition to the

notion of litterature engagee, the critique of humanism, and the condemnation of

transcendental language —are especially threatening to the conventional expectations that

Latin American writing openly denounce injustice, be deeply humanistic and employ

magical realism.

The third chapter, which considers the relationship between Saer and the work of

Nathalie Sarraute, opens with a comparison of Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet as nouveau

ronton writers and moves on to a consideration of Sarraute's views on literature as

expressed in four key essaysfromher collection L 'ere du soupgon. The following

section considers how Saer leverages Sarraute's concept of the tropism to critique the

notion of the totalizing meta-narrative. The next part of the chapter examines Saer's

translation of Sarraute's Tropisms, which provides a window onto his creative process.

Thefinalpart of the chapter connects Saer's Lo imborrable with Sarraute's Entre la vie et

la mort and Lesfruitsd'or as novels that criticize conventional notions of the relationship

36
between the writer and society. Saer's use of microscopic imagery that can be read in

conjunction with Sarraute is a pivotal dimension of his effort to forge a literary paradigm

that divergesfromthe meta-narratives that he associates with the Latin American Boom.

In Michel Butor and Claude Simon, thefinaltwo chapters study two writers who

were associated with the nouveau roman, yet divergefromthe more radically anti-

representational wing exemplified by Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou. In the fourth chapter,

I argue that while Saer takes ideasfromButor's critical essays, their projects are at

variance since Butor's project is ultimately founded on a search for authenticity and a less

enigmatic use of language than the one which marks Saer's fiction. To this end I

consider Butor's novels La modification and L 'emploi du temps. The contrast with Butor

serves to illustrate the depth of Saer's attack on the values he associates with realism.

Thefifthchapter connects Saer with the work of Claude Simon and William

Faulkner on the basis of their creation of unified literary worlds set in marginalized rural

locales. Simon and Saer were especially influenced by Faulkner and employed his

paradigm to create interconnected series' of novels set in theirfictionalsouthern regions.

Thefinalsection of the chapter links Simon's La route des Flandres with Saer's Nadie

nada nunca on the basis of their representation of memory and disaster. This chapter

provides an opportunity for reflection of the role the question of place plays in Saer's

fiction. His novels are rooted in the setting of the litoral region of Argentina and defined

by precise, detailed descriptions of its geography and weather, and the speech patterns of

its inhabitants. He portrays this space in a way that is neither an exoticized use of local

color, as in the school of costumbrismo, nor a representation of the menacing power of

37
nature that we see in a regionalist novel like Jose Eustasio Rivera's La vordgine (1924);

instead he recreates the vigor of this geography with dense and rigorous prose. This

approach upsets the expectation that, drawing on his privileged relationship with nature,

the Latin American writer depict the organic relationship that his people have with their

land. Saer'sfictionthwarts any preconceived ideas that a European reader might have

about the role that the question of place should play in a Latin American text.

38
 Chapter Two: Uncertainty and the Critique of Humanism: Saer, Jean
Ricardou, and Alain Robbe-Grillet

Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou

Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Ricardou can be considered together as

representative of the more radically anti-representational wing of the nouveau ronton.

Although other figures linked to the group resisted the association or expressed

ambivalence towards it, Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou are most responsible for

representing these otherwise disparate writers as a group with the common project of

critiquing realism and searching for new forms to supplant it. They became spokesmen

for the nouveau ronton and worked to constitute its image; just as much as writers

working in privacy, they were visible intellectualfiguresworking to put a face on the

movement in the public sphere, especially through their provocative theoretical writings,

which frequently provoked controversy. However, despite these commonalities, while

Saer was an eloquent advocate and defender of Robbe-Grillet, he was a harsh critic of

Ricardou. In this chapter I will first consider the latter writer, then the former.

Saer and Jean Ricardou

In addition to consolidating the nouveau ronton as a unit, Ricardou was also perhaps

the most active and systematic theorist of the group, outlining an ambitious and rigorous

approach to the novel that was largely informed by ideas taken from structuralism,

influential at the time when the nouveau ronton was at its height. While Ricardou has

also published several works offiction,I will concentrate here on his theoretical texts

39
since these are the ones that Saer engages with directly. If in many of his essays Saer is

at pains to argue against a mimetic approach that considers literature to reflect reality, he

uses Ricardou's more radically anti-representational stance as a point of contrast to

qualify his own position and argue in favor of language as inherently representational.

In "Notas sobre el nouveau roman," which takes a more polemical approach than

his other essays discussing the movement, in the section called "expresion, invention,"

incidentally, the longest section of the article, Saer takes issue with Ricardou's claims

regarding a theory of expression. In marked contrast to his later essay on Robbe-Grillet,

which reads as an unqualified endorsement of the nouveau roman writers, even a defense

of them against various criticisms, this early essay is primarily descriptive, with the

exception of the section that takes issue with Ricardou. Using a particularly pugnacious

and confrontational tone, Saer's central purpose in this section of the essay is to respond

to Ricardou. His careful and detailed engagement with key passages from Ricardou,

which he cites in the original French and then analyzes, testifies to the extension of his

knowledge of these writers and his investment in debating them. Saer leverages this joust

with Ricardou at this early moment in his career (1972) to work out positions that he

would develop in his later writings.

As he states in the opening lines of this section, he wants to establish a theory of

expression that doesn't posit a meaning that precedes language. As Saer remarks, "por

1
Infeet,to my knowledge Saer does not make any references to Ricardou's fiction, yet, as we will see,
responds to his theoretical points in quite specific terms.
2
For example in "La novela y la critica sociologica" he rejects sociological interpretations of literature
because they neglect the particularity of the art work and reduce literary texts to mere expressions of
sociological phenomena.

40
expresion no debemos, me parece, entender expresion de algo, sino acto puro de

expresarse, de exteriorizarse y no de exteriorizar. El material y lo que se expresa son una

y la misma cosa, y si a veces el material esta fuera del sujeto, es en el material mismo

donde el sujeto se expresa—sin ningun tipo de distincion entre el sujeto y el material"

(Saer 173). Saer is at pains to establish a theory of expression that on the one hand

breaksfromthe romanticist conception of a highly personal and interior meaning that is

expressed in the act of language and on the other, also distances itselffromthe wholesale

rejection of literature as a form of expression, Ricardou's position. Meaning is created

through the act of writing, not prior to it, but this process itself is an act of expression,

Saer wants to argue.

If Saer reacts against a notion of expression derivedfromromanticism, he also

draws on ideasfromexpressionist painting to combat Ricardou. He states that

expressionism doesn't presume the transmission of a specific message or of representing

an aspect of the world. He then goes on to provide a specific example, Edward Munch's

painting "The Scream," which expresses "no un dolor concreto del autor sino, mediante

un tratamiento especifico del cuadro, cierta idea general del Dolor, en su expresion

abstracta, independiente de sus manifestaciones en el mundo material. No tiene en vista

ningun referente" (Saer 173). His insistence that the painting does not express some

individualized suffering on the part of the painter but rather a more general and abstract

meaning of pain is reminiscent of Plato's concept of forms.

Saer goes on to criticize Ricardou's account of the artistic process by saying that

it places too much emphasis on the act of writing as the place of creation; for Saer,

41
instead, prior to the act of writing the writer has a very specific concept of what he wants

to produce:

Si bien el azar rige un gran porcentaje de la creation artistica, se trata siempre de

un azar controlado, y el deseo de escribir es el deseo de escribir algo precise En
todo caso, sera el deseo de no escribir de determinada manera. El deseo de
escribir es el deseo de escribir segun en conjunto de reglas preexistentes, de
categorias a las que el escritor adhiere, conscientemente en el caso de Robbe-
Grillet y Ricardou—y yo diria incluso voluntariamente. Porque detras de esa
presunta autonomia del texto hay, en los presupuestos teoricos de Robbe-Grillet y
Ricardou, cierto voluntarismo" (Saer 173-4).

As much as Saer wants to emphasize the idea that meaning is created in language and not

prior to it, when it comes to a discussion of artistic process and the act of writing, he

stresses the idea that a writer sets out to produce a certain kind of text and to write

according to a consciously preconceived plan. He wants to breakfromthe idea that the

simple desire to write is the first moment of creation and argues instead that a writer

begins with a desire to write something specific; writing does involve an element of

chance, but it is "un azar controlado." Against the romanticist emphasis on artistic

creation as ruled by chance, Saer asserts that a writer produces a text consciously and

voluntarily, working according to a set of aesthetic guidelines and a carefully organized

strategy. He specifically highlights Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou as writing according to

this model, since of the writers associated with the nouveau roman, they are the ones who

had the most worked out and detailed aesthetic thought systems.

His emphasis on the deliberate nature of creation might lead one to expect Saer to

assign an important place to the role of the author in his views on expression and

representation. However, he locates the act of linguistic representation in the language

itself, not in the author. Saer attacks Ricardou's deduction of a theory of non-

42
representationfromthe premise that the act of writing provokes the act of invention.

Considering that one of Saer's principal themes in his expository writing is the need for

literature to befreefromany obligation to express a particular agenda, his critique of a

theory of art that rejects representation might seem surprising, but in fact this shows that

Saer wants to preserve some concept of artistic representation, and he employs Ricardou

to take this position. Ricardou provides for Saer a more extreme anti-representational

claim against which he can position himself, qualifying and clarifying his own stance. As

Saer puts the point, "la representacion es inherente al lenguaje, no al acto de escribir. Y

es inherente al acto de leer tambien" (Saer 174). He distinguishes between the antiquated

type of representation that he associates with the realist novels of Balzac and the type of

representation in the novels of Joyce; even the playful modernist language of Joyce is

representational. He analyzes two examplesfromJoyce's Finnegan 's Wake, drawing on

Butor's prior commentary on the topic, in order to demonstrate that language itself is

referential: "riverrun es mas que un juego de palabras: es todo un programa.. .la musica

polisemica joyceana es esencialmente un acto de representacion" (Saer, 174). He does

not enter into the question of the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified

identified by Saussure, but asserts that language cannot not be representational. He also

drawsfromthe concept of intertextuality when he argues that even if we were to grant

that one of Ricardou's novels doesn't have any relationship with a referent, if another

writer invokes that text, it becomes a referent.

Saer shows himself to be a critical and thoughtful reader of the nouveau roman,

and reveals his resistance to this new direction in which the group was heading,

43
spearheaded by Ricardou. Saer was both outsider and insider to the nouveau roman

writers, and this section of the essay reflects this position. He inserts himself into their

intellectual universe by demonstrating his awareness of the questions that concerned

them at that moment, engaging with them, as well as employing terminology that would

have been familiar to them. At the same time, his publication of this piece in the essay

anthology gives us a privileged glance into the rarefied and highly specific air of the

nouveau roman as seen from the perspective of Saer in 1972.

The theoretical positions of Saer and Robbe-Grillet

Perhaps the best way to begin a study of the considerable and complex points of

connection between Saer and Robbe-Grillet is with a consideration of the parallels

between their theoretical positions, as they emerge in their critical writings. Robbe-

Grillet's essaysfromthe collection Pour un nouveau roman (1963) are a key point of

reference for Saer's construction of his own innovative and carefully elaborated aesthetic

theory in El concepto de fiction (1997), La narracion-objeto (1999) and Trabajos (2005).

Saer's approach probably owes more to Robbe-Grillet than any other contemporary

theoretician of the novel. Both Saer and Robbe-Grillet concentrate their efforts on the

novel, consciously seeking to establish a theoretical foundation and a direction for it

against the main currents at the time and in the face of the meaning it had acquired in a

J
The persistence of his interest in Ricardou is demonstrated by thefeetthat Saer also invokes his work in a
piece included in the collection Trabajos, with essays written after 2000, "Vanguardia y narration." In a
positive reference that presents a striking contrast with the polemic over representation, Saer draws on an
assertion by Ricardou in the opening lines of the piece in order to bolster his claim mat, in contrast to other
avant-garde movements mat have been absorbed into mainstream artistic culture, the nouveau roman
continues to meet with resistance, even in spite of having garnered numerous prizes and accolades over the
years. Saer takes this observation as a point of departure into an inquiry about what motivates this sort of
resistance and to the relationship between margin and center.

44
world increasingly dominated by visual culture, especially film. This was not an

uncommon project for avant-garde novelists at the time, but their outspokenness,

commitment to these questions and the rigor and consistency of their study of them is

exceptional. Both seem to have relished taking on the role of the instigator, provoking

debate by making controversial claims that went against the grain. In "La doble

longevidad del narrador Robbe-Grillet," Saer makes clear that this bold, pugnacious and

rebellious side is one of the qualities he most admires in the persona and the writings of

Robbe-Grillet. Both go beyond commentary on fiction to consider the dynamics of

reception, especially of avant-garde writing like their own that tends to be met with

resistance. Robbe-Grillet is at pains in several of his essays to correct what he perceives

as misunderstandings of his work, while Saer situates Robbe-Grillet'sfictionwithin a

broader avant-garde tradition whose tendency to provoke controversy or criticism he

seems to find intriguing, perplexing, and also finally a marker of merit.

From the outset, one of the points that both Robbe-Grillet and Saer insist upon

most, and often in even more passionate terms than other writers who agreed with them

on the point, is the need for literature to befreefromthe obligation to express any

preconceived set of political ideas. Thus while they seek to demonstrate the false terms

of the debate between art for art's sake and litterateur engagee, they also explicitly

oppose Sartre's claim regarding the writer's responsibility to produce politically

committed prose. While Robbe-Grillet takes this position within a larger context of

French writers who had also reached similar conclusions, Saer usually situates his claims

on this issue with regard to the expectations that a Latin American writer would write

45
about certain issues, in a Latin American literary context that was still at least somewhat

under the influence of Sartre's arguments from Que ce que la litterature?.

The interest by both Robbe-Grillet and Saer in the detective novel genre is

motivated by a variety of factors, but perhaps chief among them is a use of imagery of

violence not only in a literal, but also in a metaphorical sense that functions as a literary

principle. In his essay that surveys the whole span of Robbe-Grillet's career, while also

situating him within the broader context of the nouveau ronton, Saer describes the fiction

of his subject in terms that use especially violent language. However, he is not

describing an act of real physical violence, but rather his view of how Robbe-Grillet

organizes his novels; for Saer, then, one of Robbe-Grillet's chief innovations is his use of

violence not only as a subject for a work of fiction, but also as a structuring principle.

Robbe-Grillet and Saer value the literary potential inherent in contradiction,

which goes hand in hand with this metaphorical violence. As Saer states, describing

Robbe-Grillet's work,

el sentido en ellas no proviene del discurso, cuyo papel consisten normalmente en

vehicular sentido, sino de la forma narrativa, es decir la manera en que se
organizan entre si los diferentesfragmentosdel relato, que, en vez de explicarse
unos a otros como suele ocurrir en las historias lineales, mas bien se contradicen,
se desmembran, se transforman, revelando a cada paso su precariedad (Saer 120).

In addition to emphasizing narrative form over content as the instrument for transmitting

meaning, Saer uses violent language to discuss the contradictions in Robbe-Grillet's

writing, referring to them as "dismembering" eachother, in a way that recalls the murders

of old women in his own detective novel Lapesquisa. Furthermore, Saer's Nadie nada

nunea exemplifies this technique, since it is composed of disparate sections or fragments

46
of text that lack transitions and often read as disconnected. Saer repeats this notion of

tension in a variety of different contexts in his writing, for example in the following

description of the relationship between certain Latin American avant-garde writers in

"Una literatura sin atributos": "ademas, cuando nos familiarizamos con sus obras,

descubrimos que no solo tienen poco o nada en comun, sino que tambien se oponen

violentamente los unos a los otros" (Saer 266). This type of language, reminiscent of

post-structuralist theory or, more specifically of deconstruction, is a central part of the

projects of both Robbe-Grillet and Saer. Moreover, it helps to explain their attraction to

the detective novel paradigm; the violence inherent in this type of novel serves as a

valuable metaphor for their fundamental literary aesthetics.

While they express the point is contrasting terms, Robbe-Grillet and Saer both

emphasize restraint, control, and resistance to error, in a way that recalls the spirit of

scientific empiricism. For Robbe-Grillet this means critiquing humanism and the use of

metaphors that he sees as revealing an anthropocentric and/or anthropomorphosizing

tendency. In "Nature, humanisme, tragedie," an essay that Saer references on at least one

occasion,4 Robbe-Grillet argues that the existentialist notion of absurdity is rooted in a

humanist model which locates man at the center, a claim that Sartre had made in

L 'Existentialisme est tin humanisme (1946): "L'absurde est done une forme

d'humanisme tragique. Ce n'est pas un constat de separation entre Fhomme et les

choses" (Robbe-Grillet 58). Robbe-Grillet is thus opposed not only to Sartre's call for

the novel to express a political agenda, but to the very foundations of his philosophy. At

4
See "La literatura y los nuevos lenguajes" p. 209.

47
the close of "Une voie pour le roman futur" Robbe-Grillet describes his project in the

following terms:

C'est done tout le langage litteraire qui devrait changer, qui deja change. Nous
constatons, de jour en jour, la repugnance croissante des plus conscients devant le
mot a caractere visceral, analogique ou incantatoire. Cependant que Padjectif
optique, descriptif, celui qui se contente de mesurer, de situer, de limiter, de
definir, montre probablement le chemin difficile d'un nouvel art romanesque
(Robbe-Grillet 23).

Against hisfiercestcritics, characters are present in his texts, but he seeks to represent

them in a way that limits the character's imposition of his viewpoint on the world around

him as much as possible. Claiming that the world has changed in such a way as to make

this approach-where a single character or family name is the focal point of the narrative,

obsolete-he instead argues for a different use of language in literature. For Robbe-

Grillet the use of metaphor and analogy evokes a transcendental world view that he

repudiates.

The language Saer uses in the essay "Narrathon" is particularly reminiscent of

Robbe-Grillet, with its insistence on rigor, mental discipline and the principle of

hermeticism. Saer expresses the point in the following way:

eso que hay que decir seria, entonces, para mi: que no puede saberse, del
acontecer, nada. Y que lo que creemos saber ha de ser, probablemente, falso. Y
que debemos vigilar, sobre todo, nuestra pasion para que encuentre, por decir asi,
un objeto digno de ella, de modo que se convierta, la mayor parte del tiempo, en
la pasion de la distancia. La frialdad, el rechazo, la distancia: que nuestros textos
sean, como nosotros, de acero" (Saer 144).

The idea that we have to be constantly vigilant- in an intellectual and aesthetic sense

rather than a moral one—to resist the temptations that surround us, recalls the spirit of

Robbe-Grillet's theoretical writings. The opposition to transcendental (or "incantatory")

48
language emerges clearly in thefictionof both Saer and Robbe-Grillet; a common

technique in Saer's writing is the set up for a moment of apparent discovery of a deep

hidden structure or meaning, only to reveal that there is none, effectively pulling the rug

outfromunder the reader's feet. In the closing lines of the essay, Saer speaks of "un

hermetismo programaticon (Saer 150), mentioning the word "hermetismo"fivetimes in

thefinalparagraph. This type of language substitutes for Robbe-Grillet's attack on

humanism in his essays. Robbe-Grillet's critique of the existentialism of Sartre and

Camus parallels Saer's attack on the Boom novels by Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez;

both represent efforts to forge an alternative path from the dominant one in his respective

national or linguistic tradition at the time of writing.

While he does not attack humanism explicitly in his theoretical writings in the

same way that Robbe-Grillet does, Saer'sfictionis replete with references to hermeticism

and critical remarks on anthropomophocentrism and humanism. Perhaps the following

imagefromLo Imborrable (1993) best exemplifies Saer's idea of hermetics:

aparte de la boca entreabierta en una sonrisa convencional, que a deck verdad

acababa en los dientes blancos demasiado 'dientes blancos,' ningun orificio, ni
poros, ni vagina, ni ano, ni orejas, ni fosas nasales, para permitirle algun tipo de
relation org£nica con lo exterior. De tan convencional, se volvia inaccesible,
inhumana, misteriosa, igual que si hubiese sido maciza por dentro, de una sola
pieza como de dice, sin la complejidad oscura de los organos que orquestan, con
su funcionamiento polirritmico, para bien o para mal, la imprevisibilidad y la
riqueza de las especies vivas (Saer 57).

While this is a description of Carlos Tomatis's first wife Graciela, who he divorced, the

image echoes in a striking way with the description mentioned above of the concept of

"un hermetismo programatico." This sketch of Graciela's impenetrable body without any

orifices to connect it with the outside world can be read as afigurefor Saer's poetics.

49
 Glosa (1988)~which is structured around the attempt by twofriendswho meet on

the street, El Matematico and Leto, to reconstruct via hearsay and imagination the events

of Washington Noriega's birthday party, which neither of them attended—can also be

read as an attack on humanism. The very story line, which emphasizes the mediated

nature of knowledge, is an ideal format for this undertaking. The following passage

describing the shift in Leto's perspectivefroma present to a future moment, critiques the

humanist worldview and concept of the subject:

Muchos anos mas tarde sabra, gracias a evidencias sucesivas, que lo que otros
llaman el alma humana nunca tuvo ni tendra lo que otros Hainan esencia o fondo;
que lo que otros llaman caracter, estilo, personalidad, no son otracosaque
repeticiones irrazonables acerca de cuya naturaleza el propio sujeto que es el
terreno en que se manifiestan es quien esta mas en ayunas, y que lo que otros
llaman vida es una serie de reconocimientos a posteriori de los lugares en los que
una deriva ciega,incomprensible y sinfinva depositando, a pesar de si mismos, a
los individuos eminentes que despues de haber sido arrastrados por ella se ponen
a elaborar sistemas que pretenden explicarlaj pero por ahora, cuando recien
acababa de cumplir veinte anos, cree todavia que los problemas tienen soluciones,
las situaciones desenlace, los individuos caracteres y los actos sentido" (Saer 74).

The narrative voice distinguishes between Angel Leto's innocent world view as a twenty

year old and the one he will adopt as an older man; the anti-humanist position is thus

associated with maturity and experience. This attack on the idea of an "essence" is

highly reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet's critique of the humanist notion of the subject. The

conventional notion of character, style, and personality is an irrational delusion and the

concept of life is a strategy to give continuity retroactively to a series of disconnected

moments that one lives forward without any clear sense of direction.

50
 Glosa also targets the same anthropocentric tendencies that Robbe-Grillet finds

objectionable. At his own birthday party, Washington Noriega intervenes in a discussion

of the action of a horse trotting:

en primer lugar, el caballo esta demasiado cerca del hombre...lo cual contamina
el razonamiento de peligros antropocentricos, sin contar ademas que esa
proximidad del caballo con el hombre ha hecho depositario al pobre animal de
toda clase de proyecciones simbolicas, a punto tal que, bajo tantas capas de
simbolismo, ya es dificil saber donde se encuentra el verdadero caballo" (85)

Washington's criticism of the contaminating and perilous effects of anthropocentrism and

his concern with projections and symbolic language, are especially reminiscent of Robbe-

Grillet's arguments in "Nature, humanisme, tragedie."

Finally, in a short piecefromLa mayor (1976) called "Memoria olfativa," a

character sketch told in thefirstperson of a sixty six year old Philosophy Professor, the

speaker remarks: "me escribi con Francisco Romero durante alios pero nunca me atrevi a

decirle que su humanismo me parece una locura.. .para mi la relation causa efecto no

existe" (Saer 134-5). While the speaker in this text mustn't necessarily be read as a

figure for Saer, his explicit opposition to humanism again recalls Robbe-Grillet.

Moreover, he connects a severing of the notion of a direct and identifiable connection

between cause and effect to this broader repudiation of humanism. Saer's critique also

extends more broadly to the question of meaning, demonstrating how concepts that are

normally accepted as having evident signifying value can also be read as empty of

meaning. Saer's critique of humanism is less extreme than that of Robbe-Grillet, yet it

remains a central aspect of his aesthetic, as these examples demonstrate.

51
 The consistency and clarity with which Saer and Robbe-Grillet emphasize form

over content and oppose Sartre's call for committed prose distinguishes their theoretical

writings, even though these are representative positions for writers interested in the

avant-garde to take. Moreover, these two positions go together since Sartre's argument

for litterateur engagee emphasizes the content of prose, and its ability to transmit a

message. Thus one of the implications of emphasizing form is to create an alternative

model for the novel which breaksfromthe idea that it has a responsibility to transmit a

political agenda. Robbe-Grillet devotes thefinalsection of his piece "Sur quelques

notions perimees" to a discussion of the relationship between form and content, arguing

that the two are inseparable in the creative process:

II n'y a pas, pour un eerivain, deux manieres possibles d'eerire un meme livre.
Quand il pense a un roman futur, c'est toujours une ecriture qui d'abord lui
oeeupe l'esprit, et reclame sa main. II a en tete des mouvements de phrases, des
architectures, un vocabulaire, des constructions grammaticales, exactement
comme un peintre a en tete des lignes et des couleurs. Ce qui se passera dans le
livre vient apres, comme secrete par I'ecriture elle-meme. Et, une fois Poeuvre
terminee, ee quifrapperale leeteur, c'est encore cette forme qu'on affecte de
mepriser, forme dont il ne pourra souvent pas dire le sens de facon precise, mais
qui constituera pour lui le monde particulier de Fecrivain (Robbe-Grillet 41).

For Robbe-Grillet form and content do not simply go together, but form actually precedes

content in the writer's creative process.

Similarly, tracing his devotion to form back to his earliest literary readings and

inscribing his workfirmlywithin the Anglo-American modernist tradition, in

"Narrathon" (1973) Saer states

desde las primeras, maravilladas lecturas de Joyce o Faulkner a los veinte aftos, la
narration ha dejado de ser para mi una simple posibilidad de expresion para
convertirse, menos gratificante, en un problema: problema no de que,

52
 esencialistamente, decir, sino de como decir, no algo, sino un como que, dicho,
eiieontrado, sera, de un modo espontaneo, o dira, mejor, algo(Saer 140).

In "La linguistica-ficcion" (1972), he restates the point: "el problema capital que se

plantea la literatura es el de como representar. No el de que representar, sino el de como"

(Saer 179). He even goes so far, in an interview, to make the following statement:

"personalmente escucho mucha musica, yfrecuentementesu perfection formal despierta

en mi la nostalgia de un relato que sea forma pura, a lo cual tiende, sin ninguna duda, El

limonero real que, hacia el final, busca desprenderse de los acontecimientos para

resolverse poco a poco en forma pura" (Saer 286). The insistence by Robbe-Grillet and

Saer on this point shows that their commitment to the exploration of form constitutes the

centerpiece of their respective projects.

Yet the consideration by Robbe-Grillet and Saer of aesthetic questions in

relationship to the novel goes beyond the realm of fiction to the dynamics of the

reception of the nouveau roman or, more broadly, avant-garde writers. Robbe-Grillet

responds to what he perceives to be misunderstandings of his work, while Saer studies

the reasons for the frosty response to avant-garde writing, with which he associates the

works of the nouveau roman.

In two key articles, "Una literatura sin atributos" (1980) and "La selva espesa de

lo real" (1979), Saer applies several ideas that are central to Robbe-Grillet's aesthetic

theory and uses them to critique and complicate conventional notions of Latin American

literature and the Latin American writer, building a precise and highly original theoretical

framework. He argues against the very concept of Latin American literature, since it

leads to preconceived notions and oversimplifications. To comply with the conventional

53
expectations that European and North American readers have of Latin American writing

is to reproduce a power relationship reminiscent of colonialism, Saer argues. Perhaps

first and foremost he takes Robbe-Grillet's claim opposing the Sartrean notion of

commitment and gives it afreshmeaning by using it to argue against the expectation that

the Latin American novelist produce politically committed prose. The image in Saer's

claim, drawing on the phrase from Musil's novel, that the writer should be "A man

without attributes" evokes both his own use of the concept of hermeticism and also

Robbe-Grillet's critique of anthropocentrism and humanism in "Nature, humanisme,

tragedie." In an essay whose main thrust is to undermine the predominant notion of Latin

American literature, Saer closes appropriately by drawing on this image as a figure for

writers universally, regardless of their language or national origin.

The anti-humanist detective novel: Robbe-Grillet's Les gommes and Saer's Nadie
nada nunca

Since Argentina, along with Mexico and Cuba, is the Latin American nation

where the detective novel or "novela negra"5 has the most developed history (Simpson),

Saer's interest in this form inscribes him within a broader national tradition.6 The fact

that the two established currents in the detective story—the analytical/classical version of
5
The terms "cuento policial" or "novela detectivesca" are also common.
6
In the same way that Saer's translations inscribe him within a tradition of translation in Argentina, which I
will discuss briefly later in this chapter in connection with Robbe-Grillet and in detail in the next chapter in
connection with die work of Nathalie Sarraute.

54
Poe (1840's) and Conan Doyle (first published 1887) and the hardboiled novels of

Raymond Chandler (1930's and 1940's) and Dashiell Hammett (1920's)--were highly

codified genresfromearlier moments in literary history presented a problem for Saer:

How could he engage with this paradigm in an innovative fashion and incorporate it into

his literary world rather than simply replicating this well-worn precedent? In this regard

Borges's "La muerte y la brujula" (1944) and Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931) present

contemporary models for how Saer could creatively work with the elements of the

detective tradition. Moreover, the novels of Robbe-Grillet, especially Les gommes and

Le voyeur, would provide another precedent, one that emerged out of the nouveau roman

tradition that exemplified a theory of the novel he endorsed. The detective novel

paradigm is also a productive angle from which to examine the connections between

Robbe-Grillet and Saer because it condenses several of the main topics of interest to

them, like perception, representation and epistemology.

Whereas Borges prioritized the analytical detective story tradition, and denigrated

the hardboiled line,7 Saer was an eloquent advocate of the latter. In the classical

tradition, a detective of superior intelligence solves the crime and restores order in society

through the use of his highly developed powers of reason, while in the north American

brand of hardboiledfiction,the exploits of a marginalizedfigurelike Phillip Marlowe

leads him to discover that the whole society is corrupt. Drawing on these traditions, Saer

does not produce narratives that fit neatly into either one of these categories, but draw

elementsfromthem, parodying them in a way that demonstrates a consciousness of the

7
See "El cuento policial" in Borges oral (1979)

55
"novela negra" as a highly codified form of popular fiction. Saer's defense of the

hardboiled form of Raymond Chandler is particularly interesting and surprising given his

criticism of mass culture, since hardboiledfictionis a form of novel that is written for a

broad audience. However, rather than using this form to intervene in the debate over the

relationship between literature and popular culture, Saer claims the work of Chandler as

serious literature that bears re-reading, as opposed to other detective novels that serve

only to entertain.8

Saer's earliest novel to engage with the model of the detective novel, Cicatrices

(1969), which many critics regard as hisfirstmature work, contains elements of the

hardboiled tradition of Raymond Chandler that he openly admired in his essays. Through

four interconnected narratives told in thefirstperson, Cicatrices portrays life in a small

town in Argentina; the sections are linked by the story of metal worker Luis Fiore, who

murders his wife and then commits suicide. Yet, rather than being the central event of

the novel, the story of Fiore is a unifying thread, since several of the sections are, at least

ostensibly, unrelated to it. With its fragmented and decentered narrative that brings

together several storylines, and the non-linear nature of the temporal structure of the text,

Cicatrices can be read as a rewriting of the North American hardboiled detective novel.

Even at this early moment in his development as a writer, rather than producing a

hardboiled detective novel, Saer incorporates references to this tradition which make his

text an homage to it. The invocation of a character named Philip Marlowe, the question

of doubling, the use of clipped dialogue, and a nod to The Long Goodbye are all part of

8
See "El largo actios"

56
the web of intertextual allusions that play a vital role especially in thefirstof the four

sections of the text.

Robbe-Grillet's first novel Les gommes (1953) is an important precedent for Saer

of how this apparently outdated genre could be imaginatively re-written, thus

exemplifying his broader argument about the need to breathe life into the novel by

finding new forms. The novel that announced to the literary world the arrival of an

innovative new writer, Les gommes recounts the story of detective Wallas' s investigation

of the death of Professor Daniel Dupont in an unnamed, marginal town, only to end up

killing Dupont himself. Told in the detached objectivist style that came to be Robbe-

Grillet's trademark, the novel created both excitement and controversy. Those who

praised the novel found in it a highly original approach to prosefiction,while those who

criticized it found it to be lacking in story and complexity of character. A member of the

former camp, in a relatively short time Roland Barthes became one of Robbe-Grillet's

most vocal supporters,findinghisfictionexemplary of many of his post-structuralist

concepts.9 The relationship between these twofiguresis especially interesting, as their

names became associated in the French literary world. For his part, Saer's comment on

Robbe-Grillet's best known example of the detective novel reveals the esteem in which

he holds the text: "Dentro de cien anos, probablemente, si es que dentro de cien afios se

sigue leyendo todavfa a Robbe-Grillet, o se sigue simplemente leyendo, Les gommes ha

de entrar, seguramente, en la tradition de Racine y de Flaubert" (Saer 249). To situate

Robbe-Grillet alongside the most reveredfiguresof French literature might be a

9
See Barthes's introduction to Robbe-Grillet's La jalousie.

57
scandalous claim for opponents of the nouveau roman, and the statement could be read as

an intentionally provocative gesturefromthe young Saer.

The structure of Les gommes in disconnected blocks of text recalls Saer's

commentary on the violent and contradictory nature of Robbe-Grillet's novels, and

corresponds in Saer's oeuvre to Nadie nada nunca. On the level of plot, Robbe-Grillet's

novel rewrites the detective story paradigm by having the detective commit the very

crime he is supposedly investigating. While the plot contains a different variation on the

conventional detective story, Borges's "La muerte y la brujula" also inverts this tradition

by making the detective the victim of the criminal Scharlach at the end of the story rather

than capturing him. The awareness in the text of a long detective tradition in literature is

indicated by Lonnrot's instruction to Scharlach to kill him in a more elegant fashion the

next time they meet, creating a sense of a constantly repeating game between detective

and criminal. These lines suggest that for Borges, in a gesture evocative of the

intertextual play that is key in both Robbe-Grillet and Saer, the detective story refers back

to other detective stories just as much as to the non-literary world. These works by

Borges and Robbe-Grillet subvert the conventional detective plot by converting the

instrument ofjustice into either the perpetrator of a violent act or an impotent victim

outsmarted by a foe who represents disorder.

Les gommes is also an excellent fictional example of the anti-humanist stance that

Robbe-Grillet expresses in "Nature, humanisme, trag&lie." The detached and restrained

narrative voice sketches out the protagonist Wallas, in addition to the other characters in

the narrative—Daniel Dupont, the commissioner Laurent, Jean Bonaventure, and others--

58
in a way that resists individuation, or psychological or emotional depth. The mechanical

descriptions make them into pieces in a chess game.

However, the coldness and detachment of the narrative betrays the personal

connection that the protagonist Wallas bears to the crime in question. Rather than being a

foreign visitor to the town where the crime takes place, Wallas was actually born there;

thus, as in Le voyeur, the protagonist's presence in a town where he doesn't live presently

constitutes a return to a childhood home. Moreover, if we read Les gommes as a

rewriting of Sophocles' Oedipus the King— the references to this narrative request that it

be read this way—we can interpret Wallas' s murder of Daniel Dupont as the killing of his

father, and his attraction to Dupont's ex-wife, the shopkeeper at the stationery store, as a

desire for his mother. The detached tone of the narrative can thus be seen as expressive

of Wallas's attempt to distance himself from events to which he bears a deeply personal

relationship.

The novel also undermines the absolute value that the Sherlock Holmes stories

place on the reasoning ability of the detective, by showing how in spite of his belief that

he can reduce the world to logic, Wallas is driven by unconscious forces. When he goes

to speak with Dupont's ex-wife (also perhaps Wallas's mother), she describes his

character as exceedingly rational:

II y avait toujours une raison—pour le moindre de ses gestes. Quand elle

n'apparaissait pas sur le moment, on s'apercevait plus tard qu'il y en avait une
tout de meme, une raison precise, une raison longuement pesee qui ne laissait
dans l'ombre aucun aspect de la question. Daniel ne faisait rien sans l'avoir
decide a l'avance et ses decisions etaient toujours raisonnables; sans appel aussi,
bien entendu.. .Manque de fantaisie, si vous voulez, mais a un degre
extraordinaire... Je n'ai eu en somme que des qualites a lui reprocher: de n'agir
jamais sans reflechir, de ne jamais changer d'avis, de ne jamais se tromper

59
 (Robbe-Grillet 182).

It makes sense that Dupont, an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe's avatar of rationality,

detective Dupin, would be described this way. The fascination of Saer and Robbe-Grillet

with the analytic detective as the ultimate representative of rationality arisesfromboth an

attraction to this faculty and a recognition of its limitations.

The structural parallels between Les gommes and Nadie nada nunca are especially

strong. Saer's description in "La doble longevidad del narrador Robbe-Grillet," of a

novel composed offragmentsrather than interconnected sections of prose is an excellent

account not only of the structure of Les gommes, but also of Nadie nada nunca.

Published in 1980, during the last military dictatorship in Argentina, the novel tells the

story of a series of murders of horses which terrify the country and inform the

relationship between protagonist Cat and his mistress Elisa. When the vicious military

police officer Caballo Leyva, legendary for his torturing techniques, is killed, martial law

is instituted and tensions quickly mount, culminating in the disappearance of Cat and

Elisa. Yet their vanishing, an event to which later Saer novels refer,10 is represented in an

oblique style, like a gap in the text that recalls the open space in Robbe-Grillet's Le

voyeur, the unnacounted for time in the narrative during which Mathias may have

committed murder. The disjointed nature of Saer's novel distinguishes itfromalmost all

of his other works offiction,even those which treat the same themes, the last military

dictatorship in Argentina and the use of elementsfromthe detective tradition;

10
In Lapesqmsa the narrative refers several times to this event, creating a post-dictatorship thread to the
novel where the characters cope with feelings of melancholy, guilt and loss. While this thread is given
considerably less space than the other two main narratives, at least one critic has argued convincingly that it
can be read as the central dimension of the work. This connection shows that Saer employs the detective
genre to comment on the last military dictatorship in Argentina.

60
consequently, Nadie nada nunca might be regarded as the Saer novel which most bears

the mark of his interest in the work of Robbe-Grillet. Thisfracturedstructure is

especially appropriate to the theme of Saer's text; the violent form is consistent with the

gruesome content of the novel.

One of the most distinctive aspects of Robbe-Grillet's approach to narrative

perspective in Les gommes is his use of a technique whereby he excludes context or

withholds clues that tell the reader whose thoughts or actions are being described,

delaying the revelation of the required information until a later moment. This method,

which is part of Robbe-Grillet's disjointed narrative, confounds the reader. Saer's Nadie

nada nunca employs the same technique, combining it with an intertextual reference in a

section where he inserts a passagefromthe Marquis de Sade's Philosophic dans le

boudoir into the work without telling the reader that he is actually inside Cat's head

reading this text. Consequently, until Cat puts down the book, the reader experiences this

section as if it were part of the action of Saer's novel when on the contrary he is

effectively being put in the place of Cat reading de Sade. The effect is quite jarring, for

while the text is fascinating and somewhat thematically related to Saer's novel, the reader

is aware that some dramatic shift has occurred, but without the necessary cues he does

not know what it is. This experience replicates the process of reading a work of fiction,

where one is immersed in a world that differs from the one he is situated in physically.

In Nadie nada nunca Cat's agoraphobia is related to Saer's concept of

hermeticism. In a theme that also recurs in Lo imborrable in thefigureof Carlos

Tomatis, when the novel begins Cat has been housebound for some time, living in a state

61
of extreme isolation. While this solitude is justified considering the violent nature of the

events occurring outside the doors of his home, it also reveals the protagonist's degraded

state. This sharp boundary between public and private space connects with the concept

of hermeticism that Saer outlines in "Narrathon," since Cat's enclosure within his home

can be read not only as reflective of Saer's notion of subjectivity but also as afigurefor

his vision of the author and the literary text, sealed up, resisting the temptation to err,

impenetrable and as strong as steel. In a comment that could be taken to stand for the

atmosphere of the novel as a whole, the narrative voice remarks "las embarcaciones se

sacuden con una intensidad y con un ritmo diferentes, como si la causa que las ha puesto

en movimiento fuese distinta para cada una, o como si cada unaflotaseen un medio

particular, estanco, mostrando de ese modo la continuidad ilusoria del agua" (Saer 151).

Saer's fascination with the idea of separation and enclosure is evident.

Nadie nada nunca is the clearestfictionalexample of how Saer takes the lessons

he learns from Robbe-Grillet regarding structure and the critique of humanism and puts

them into the service of a narrative that explores the terror of the last military dictatorship

in Argentina. His darkest work written both about and during the dictatorship is also his

novel that contains the most readily identifiable objectivist elements. Unlike La

pesquisa, Nadie nada nunca does not announce itself as a detective story; however, the

tense atmosphere and the effort to solve a series of crimes at its core are reminiscent of

the genre, prompting it to be read as a more subtle use of the elements of the detective

paradigm. The protagonist of the novel, Cat, is neither detective nor criminal, but rather

functions as an observer and documenter of the crimes being committed around him.

62
Thus, just as on the level of the essay Saer takes certain key conceptsfromRobbe-Grillet

and applies them in "Una literatura sin atributos" and "La selva espesa de la realidad" to

questions of Latin American literature, on the level of fiction, Saer takes elements from

Robbe-Grillet's version of the nouveau roman and leverages them to present a deeply

disturbing vision of "el proceso" in Argentina.

While Cicatrices dialogues with the hardboiled model and Lapesquisa returns to

the origins of the detective story by rewriting the analytical tales of Poe and Conan

Doyle, Nadie nada nunca does not correspond clearly to either one of these lines.

Nevertheless, the detective model is an important part of its structure, since the

investigation of the horse murders is the central narrative thread. One way of reading the

text is as an argument that the detective novel presents a privileged site for exploration of

this violent chapter in Argentinian history. Alternatively, perhaps Saer asserts through

this novel that after the last military dictatorship the detective novel can no longer be

written in the same way in Argentina; if it ever possessed a period of innocence, that

stage has come to a dramatic conclusion with this tragic chapter in the nation's history.

As I will discuss in the next chapter, Saer draws on Nathalie Sarraute's concept of

suspicion in his writings, and Nadie nada nunca can be read as another application of this

concept. When the police become the agents of evil, the concept ofjustice is redefined;

Saer's novel reflects this shift.

The link between Saer's translation of Robbe-Grillet's vignette "La Plage" from

French to Spanish and the imagery in Nadie nada nunca further corroborates the claim

that this novel is especially indebted to Robbe-Grillet's techniques. While Robbe-

63
Grillet's original version of the text, written in 1956, was published in the collection

Instantanes in 1962, Saer's translation of it was published in the October 1967 edition of

the Rosario/Santa Fe journal Setecientosmonos. Saer only published this single

translationfromRobbe-Grillet's collection, but the idea of vignettes or short fragmented

pieces that aren't so much short stories as tightly controlled andrigorouslywritten

descriptions of moments, was a genre that appealed to him, as shown by his numerous

short pieces that take the same basic form. The elements reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet in

Nadie nada nunca already discussed in this chapter together with the high level of

coincidence between Robbe-Grillet's "La plage" and the imagery, conveyed to the

narrator through the observing eye of Catfromhis home, of the two children playing with

a multicolored beach ball on the banks of theriverin Saer's novel, suggests that this text

was source material for Saer's writing of the novel. In both texts the children are

described as being about twelve years old, perhaps a nodfromSaer to the informed

reader aware of his translation of Robbe-Grillet's vignette.

The next chapter considers in detail the connection between Saer's translation of

Sarraute's Tropismes and his piece "La mayor." While his translation of her text is non-

literal, his rendering of Robbe-Grillet's piece is almost exclusively literal. This doesn't

necessarily reflect a varying attitude towards the writer as much as Robbe-Grillet's text

being more difficult to take liberties with in the translation since in general it is a

straightforward narrative, in contrast to Sarraute's extensive use of ellipses and other

sorts of formal innovations.The fact that these are his only two published translations

64
suggests that translation was a privileged medium through which he dialogued with the

nouveau roman.

Robbe-Grillet's text describes three children, two boys and a girl, around twelve

years old, walking together along the shore, continually approaching a group of birds

who then fly away and land somewhere else nearby, only to repeat the scene. The

ringing of the bells and the children's indifferent response to them show that they are in

absentiafromsome kind of institution; the bells are associated with clock time, while the

children are in nature, awayfromcivilization. Rather than being individuated, the

children are described as practically the same in numerous ways, indicative of Robbe-

Grillet's narrative style that eschews depth of characterization. They also show very little

emotion, but are marked by their lack of expressions and nonchalance.

Robbe-Grillet's text is really just a placid beach scene where he is working out his

style, but Saer's description of the two children playing innocently in the context of the

terrible violence going on in the society around them creates a sense of tension and

violence that is implicit in the apparently tranquil scene, therefore ratcheting up the

tension all the more since it is hidden just beneath the surface. The shore is part of the

natural world, still not far from the dangerous presence of man. Saer transposes a beach

scene to a scene on the banks of theriverin his zona in Argentina, and takes advantage of

Robbe-Grillet's discovery of this geography as a privileged space for the exploration of

questions of perception, space, time and distance.

65
 The systematic principle of uncertainty: Le voyeur and Lapesquisa

If Les gommes and Nadie nada nunca are structurally similar, Robbe-Grillet's Le

voyeur (1958) and Saer's Lapesquisa (1994) are rewritings of the detective novel that

exemplify how the two authors employ uncertainty as an aesthetic principle. Le voyeur

tells the story of protagonist Mathias's tripfrommainland France to an island where he

was born with the apparent motivation of selling wristwatches in order to help pay off

some of his debt. While on the island a girl named Jacqueline is murdered and Mathias

quickly becomes a suspect. Thefreeindirect discourse of the narrative conveys Mathias's

steadily increasing anxiety, but just when we think that he will be found guilty he

manages to escape the island and the crime remains unresolved. In Lapesquisa, during a

visit to his native Santa FefromParis, Pichon Garay tells hisfriends,Carlos Tomatis and

Marcelo Soldi, the story of a serial killer of old women in France. The conclusion of the

novel reveals that the culprit was one of the two detectives investigating the case, Morvan

or Lautret; while a plausible explanation is offered for each, the novel never clarifies who

committed the atrocious crimes. This narrative thread is interspersed with the search for

the identity of the author of a found manuscript entitled En las tiendas griegas, a mystery

that also goes unresolved.

Saer describes Robbe-Grillet's work in terms of what he calls "un sistematico

principio de incertidumbre" (Saer 120), a concept that can be linked to Werner Karl

Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty11 (Smith 21) in the realm of scientific inquiry. He

refers to the same idea in the following terms in the same essay: "las minuciosas y

1
' This theory, published in 1927,fromQuantum Physics states mat the position and the momentum of a
particle cannot both be known simultaneously.

66
admirables descripciones que, con su evidencia enigmatica no agregan claridad al

conjunto, sino mas bien duda y misterio, van dejando en el lector una sucesion de

impresiones que no le procuran ningun sentido, sino mas bien una especie de implication

emocional vaga y nitida a la vez" (Saer 121). Just as hermeticism is a central aspect of

his aesthetic, so is uncertainty; his pursuit of it is deliberate and systematic. Rather than

clarity, he creates texts marked by enigma and doubt. Lapesquisa and Le voyeur are

both lucid examples of how Saer and Robbe-Grillet employ the concept of uncertainty in

theirfiction;Lapesquisa concludes with two possible explanations of the crime, neither

of which is given any more authenticity than the other, while Le voyeur ends without

revealing whether or not Mathias actually killed Jacqueline; the evidence that he is the

culprit is strong, but not definitive. Both novels call into question the predominant

explanatory narrative by introducing an alternative version of the events, pulling the rug

outfromunder the reader's feet and subverting his expectations; they rewrite the

convention of the detective novel that calls for a neat and clear resolution.

Saer's description of Robbe-Grillet's most recent novel, La reprise, functions as a

description of the challenging effect of the principle of uncertainty in Lapesquisa and Le

voyeur:

los adictos del relate lineal, los partidarios de la legibilidad inmediata y continua
de un sistema narrativo, los incondicionales del sentido y de la representation de
acontecimientos a los que se les atribuye un perentorio acaecer exterior al texto,
no encontraran en La reprise ninguna de esa pautas tranquilizadoras, en todo caso
como imperativos excluyentes de cualquier otra tentativa de exploration de las
posibilidades del relate (Saer 119).

The principle of uncertainty that Saer advocates undermines the legibility and the

calming impact of the linear narrative. The way Saer and Robbe-Grillet strategically

67
employ gaps in theirfictionis part of their principle of uncertainty. In a key moment in

Le voyeur, after meticulously documenting how Mathias uses his time while on the

island, at the moment in the narrative when the murder of Jacqueline occurs Robbe-

Grillet suddenly refrains from describing Mathias's activity, creating a hole in the fabric

of the text that is never filled in. This move is part of the overall effect of uncertainty in

the novel, which culminates with the calling into question of Mathias's guilt.

The disappearance of Cat and Elisa in Saer's Nadie nada nunca functions in a

similar fashion, since this development is not made entirely clear within the novel, except

by implication, and instead emerges by way of reference in subsequent Saer novels,

namely Lapesquisa. Thus Saer draws on Robbe-Grillet's technique of narrative gaps and

employs it to represent a more literal and concrete form of historical loss, the

disappearance of people in Argentina and other Cono Sur nations during the military

dictatorships of the seventies and eighties. The use of the terms "desaparecer" and

"desaparecido" can be read as a graphic and disturbingly concrete application of the

notion of a gap: "de esa casa habian desaparecido varios afios antes, sin dejar

literalmente rastro, el Gato y Elisa.. .Nunca mas en siete y ocho afios un solo signo de su

existencia material, ni siquiera sus cenizas, habia aparecido" (Saer 88-9). The physical

absence of the bodies of Cat and Elisa becomes a metaphor for the incommensurable and

ineffable loss caused by their disappearance. The images of erasure in the work of

Saer—for example the title of the novel Lo Imborrable—vMch parallel similar types of

descriptions in Robbe-Grillet—take for instance the title Les gommes—can also be read

68
along similar lines. In Saer references to deletion of writing cannot help but resonate

with the theme of the desaparecidos in the Southern Cone countries.

The disappearance of people creates a tremendous uncertainty for the family

members of the victims, making the principle of "incertidumbre" an especially

appropriate literary strategy for Saer to employ in his narrations of these events. The

principle of uncertainty goes hand in hand with the effect that Saer and Robbe-Grillet

want their texts to have on the reader. Reading resembles detection in the sense that it

involves the search for clues, evidence and resolution. Yet if the novel compels the

reader to identify with the detective and the detective turns out to be the criminal, then

the reader too is identified with the criminal. In the "capitulos prescindibles" ofRayuela

(1963) Julio Cortazar, through the writings of a fictional writer named Morelli,

distinguishes between a "lector-hembra," who would read the novel straight through and

stop at the end of the narrative, omitting the extra chapters, and a "lector-complice," who

reads all the chapters in the order indicated in the table of instructions. Morelli also hints

at a third possible type of reader who reads the book in the order of his own choosing.

Regardless of how we evaluate these different types of readers, the very identification of

these different possibilities sets a precedent in Argentinian literature for the question of

reading styles. In S/Z (1970) Roland Barthes distinguishes between readerly texts, which

allow for passive reading, and writerly texts, which compel him to be more active and

participate in the production of the work. Saer and Robbe-Grillet contribute to this

debate by showing how a principle of uncertainty can also be leveraged to create new

ways of reading and jar the reader out of his complacency.

69
 This interest in the reader and the experience of reading is a question that engages

most of the writers associated with the nouveau roman. As Saer puts it, "hay que ser

antes que nada un verdadero y concentrado lector" (Saer 121), who approaches the text

not only with the intellect but in a way that goes beyond reason:

el texto no se agota para la razon o la inteligencia del lector, que solo pueden
captarlo de manera fragmentaria y aun contradictoria, ni siquiera para sus
emociones en lo que tienen de conscientes, sino que produce su impacto en una
zona crepuscular de la conciencia en la que los mecanismos asociativos estimulan
reminiscencias que, por vagas que le parezcan a la zona clara, producen un efecto
seguro en las regiones oscuras, semejantes a las asociaciones confusas que
despiertan los suenos, y aun a la forma narrativa de muchos de ellos, en los que la
incoherencia aparente de la anecdota no logra atenuar un sentido omnipresente
que es a la vez familiar y secreto" (Saer 120).

In Saer's formulation the effort to create a text that engages the reader more actively goes

hand in hand with the critique of excessive reason discussed in the previous section of

this chapter on Les gommes and Nadie nada nunca; just as Saer and Robbe-Grillet parody

the analytic detective's sense of himself as a purely rational subject, Saer argues that the

reading experience operates on a subconscious as much as a conscious level, a realm

where dreams and associations come into play. The reader, like the detective, is a subject

whose experience of the world, whether he wants to believe it or not, goes far beyond the

rational.

Both Lapesquisa and Les gommes create a strong link between the processes of

detection and reading, making the detective story into a privileged site for reflection on

the relationship between author, text and reader. The novels insert themselves into

contemporary debates about these questions, but especially about the question of

authorship, hotly debated by figures like Barthes and Foucault in France. In Saer's novel

70
the parallel between the two interwoven storylines—the investigation of a series of

murders of elderly women in France on the one hand and the search for the author of a

discovered novel in Argentina on the other—creates a link where the author is represented

as detective and the detective as author. In both texts the search for the criminal is

portrayed as a search for the "author" of these crimes.

At the same time, the novels connect readership with criminality. The boundary

between reader and text is collapsed by making the reader, almost despite himself,

identify with the detective and/or the criminal. By creating a parallel between reading

and detection, and eventually showing how the detectives are themselves the criminals,

the two novels also implicate their readers in the committing of the crimes. While the

reader typically prefers to see himself as outside the text, these novels conspire to make

him participate in their construction, making him complicit in the murder [s] that is [are]

committed.

The title of Saer's essay "La doble longevidad del narrador Robbe-Grillet" refers

to the relatively long life Robbe-Grillet had already lived at the time Saer wrote, but also

to the enduring relevance of his work. The phrase "el narrador Robbe-Grillet" also

evokes a continuity of first person narration in Robbe-Grillet's fiction, which is

exemplified by the connections between Wallas in Les gommes and Mathias, the

protagonist of Le voyeur. Like Wallas, Mathias is returning to the town where he was

born and raised, even while both downplay this essential detail in their narratives,

mentioning it only briefly. In both cases this return to a place of origin—in both novels a

marginalized locale—is linked to a return to childhood memories.

71
 Similarly, in Lapesquisa Pichon Garay returnsfromParis to the Santa Fe

province, a rural and peripheral space linked to an earlier moment in his life. Both Le

voyeur and Lapesquisa paint precise portraits of the places of origin, including the land,

weather and speech patterns of the inhabitants. Both novels also involve allusions to

classical Greek literature or mythology, whether in the reference to theritualof the

sacrifice of the virgin in Le voyeur or to the two perspectives on the Trojan war in La

pesquisa; these allusions are consistent with the theme of the return to origins since the

invocation of these classical references is associated with a recurrence to the origins of

western civilization. The texts complicate their respective narratives by allowing the

reader to access them only indirectly, whether through being so immersed in Mathias's

consciousness that we cannot have an outside perspective, to the introduction of the story

of the French serial killer only through Pichon's storytelling to his friends in Argentina.

Mathias is able to get outside of his place of origin, but not outside of his own head, and

neither are we as readers able to escape the claustrophobic effect of entrapment within his

consciousness. In Saer's novel theframingpart of the story that takes place in Argentina

counterbalances and allows an escapefromthe intensely violent narrative that takes place

in Paris, in a way that is impossible in Robbe-Grillet's novel.

The isolated locales where Mathias and Pichon travel are juxtaposed against

urban spaces associated with the excesses of capitalism. In Robbe-Grillet's novel

Mathias is a watch salesman and the apparent main motivation for his trip to the island is

financial: "II avait fallu l'espoir de ce marche exceptionnel pour decider Mathias a

entreprendre le voyage, qui n'etait pas compris dans son plan theorique de" (Robbe-

72
Grillet 25). However, as the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that this explanation

may hide deeper, more sinister motivations; perhaps Mathias goes to the island in order

to commit a murder. In Saer's novel, Morvan observes the buying frenzy of the

Christmas season as he walks through Paris:

Aunque el ultimo dios de Occidente se encarno como dicen en este mundo y se

hizo crucificar a los treinta y tres afios, con el fin de que las grandes tiendas, los
supermercados y las casas de articulos para regalos multipliquen su volumen de
ventas el dia de su cumpleanos, sus adoradores, que han sustituido la plegaria por
la compra a credito y la veneration de los martires por la foto autografiada de
algun jugador de futbol, que no esperan m&s milagros que un viaje para dos
personas en el sorteo de los juegos televisivos, habian desertado a causa del mal
tiempo los unicos lugares de culto que frecuentan con regularidad y sin ningun
atisbo de hipocresia, las zonas comerciales (Saer 110-111).

The passage suggests that a religious God has been replaced by a God of capitalism in the

modern world. In the following commentary, which echoes this passage, from "La doble

longevidad del narrador Robbe-Grillet," Saer represents Robbe-Grillet's work as a form

of resistance to consumer culture:

En literatura, la hegemonia de los imperatives industriales ha hecho del relato su

producto mas inmediata y masivamente comercializable, de modo que cada otofio
y cada primavera los grandes centros editoriales.. .lanzan una avalancha de
mercancia narrativa inepta y efimera que ocupa todo el espacio cultural, y que a la
temporada siguiente sera suplantada por una nueva avalancha, cuya abundancia,
mayor aiin que la de la temporada anterior, no se debe en nada al advenimiento de
una nueva edad de oro literaria, sino, mas banalmente, a las leyes inflexibles del
crecimiento industrial. En Septiembre, la excitada rentree parisiense no se
abstuvo de bombardear medios, ferias y vidrieras con sus cuantiosos productos
biodegradables, pero en el mes de octubre un verdadero acontecimiento literario,
rarisimo en estos tiempos, se produjo: la aparicion simultanea de dos libros de
Alain Robbe-Grillet y de una serie de revistas.. .y de suplementos de diarios
dedicados a presentar su obra y, mas generalmente, el Nouveau Roman (Saer 117-
118).

This passage, which recalls a similar commentary on the threat that mass culture poses to

literature in "La literatura y los nuevos lenguajes," shows how one of the chief merits

73
Saer ascribes to Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman is that they represent a valid and

enduring movement as opposed to temporary and fashionable literary trends. The

embedding of the murder story within the context of consumer culture suggests that

Mathias and Lautret/Morvan can be read as products of societies driven by consumerism.

Lapesquisa and Les gommes build on the foundations established by the

hardboiled and the analytical traditions, commenting upon them in the process. While in

the train station to meet with Doctor Juard, Wallas notices that "quelques articles de

papeterie etaient exposes au milieu des illustres et des romans d'aventures a couverture

de couleur" (Robbe-Grillet 229). From Saer's references in Cicatrices to the figure of

Phillip Marlowe and the novel The Long Goodbye to Robbe-Grillet's use of the name

Dupont, a clear wink to the informed reader to think of Poe's Dupin, the intertextual

references to the tradition of detective fiction are an inseparable part of the fabric of these

narratives. If Cicatrices dialogues with the hardboiled detective story, Lapesquisa

returns to the origins of the tradition by invoking the analytical model: "Me parecio que

volver a los orfgenes del genero podia ser una solution interesante, no para parodiarlos,

sino para tomarlos otra vez como punto de partida y avanzar a partir de ellos en mi propia

direccidn" (Saer 160). The invocation of a French setting and the use of a French

detective in Lapesquisa recall Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and the emphasis on reason

harks back to Sherlock Holmes as well.

Discussing a collection of Robbe-Grillet's texts called Le voyageur, Saer remarks,

"Le voyageur es tambien el tftulo de la recopilacion de articulos, ensayos y entrevistas

que acaba de aparecer al mismo tiempo que la novela, y era tambien el titulo que habia

74
sido previsto en un principio para la novela que muchos consideran como su obra

maestra: Le voyeur ("El miron," 1955). Dos letras (ag) borradas en mitad de la palabra

cambiaron radicalmente el sentido del tftulo" (Saer 122). As Saer's commentary

suggests, Robbe-Grillet's original title for le voyeur was Le voyageur. The nouveau

roman was especially influential in Saer's literary circle in Santa Fe (Gramuglio), but

comments like this show that his engagement was personal and sustained.

As Nadie nada nunca takes some of the structural principles from Robbe-Grillet's

Les gommes and applies them to the moment of the last dictatorship in Argentina, La

pesquisa draws upon elements from Le voyeur and intersperses them with a narrative that

explores the aftermath of that same military dictatorship, in a post-dictatorship context

that involves questions of guilt and mourning. At least one critic has argued

convincingly that the few references to the disappearance of Cat and Elisa in La pesquisa

are some of the most resonant moments in the novel. Thus all three of Saer's novels

that engage most directly with elements from the detective genre, Cicatrices, Nadie nada

nunca, and La pesquisa, place them in the service of a narrative that explores key

moments involving violence in Argentinian history. Saer's importation of nouveau

roman elements into the Argentine novel of dictatorship and post-dictatorship constitutes

a contribution to Argentine letters, while his exportation of themesfromArgentinian

history can be read as a contribution to the nouveau roman.

12
See Goldberg, "La pesquisa de Juan Jose Saer: Alambradas de la ficcion.:

75
 Chapter Three: Tropism and Translation: Saer and Nathalie Sarraute

Two Contrasting Paradigms of Nouveau Roman', from Robbe-Grillet to

Sarraute

When people think of the nouveau roman they immediately think of the work of

Robbe-Grillet, yet the fiction of Nathalie Sarraute presents an alternative version of the

French new novel which was equally important for the work of Saer. Before bringing

Saer into the equation, however, I would like to outline some of the key points of

comparison and contrast between Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute. Both critique the

continued use of outdated literary techniques in the twentieth century novel and argue for

the need to find new ones, basing this claim on the idea that the world1 has changed and

along with it the relationship between reader and writer. Both Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet

could be called postmodernists for the way their writing selfconsciously plays upon and

rewrites previous genres, and makes extensive use of gaps and uncertainty, which both

engages and provokes the reader. The anxiety they share regarding the place of the novel

in a visual age dominated by film, photography and mass media also informs their

writing.

However, there are important differences between the two writers that make their

respective projects into two distinctive versions of the nouveau roman; Sarraute's

concerns are so particular and individual that some critics have even questioned whether

or not she should be associated with the new novel writers at all. Robbe-Grillet was a

more polarizing and controversial figure in French letters who apparently relished the

spotlight while Sarraute appears to have preferred to remain in the background, quietly

producing her work and letting it speak for itself. Perhaps as a result of the fact that
1
1 follow Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet by employing a term that may seem broad.
76
Robbe-Grillet's navels work off and play upon the detective genre, they depict or allude

to moments of actual physical violence, while hers employ images of violence as

metaphors for psychological or emotional conflicts. Whereas Robbe-Grillet's writing is

marked by his characteristic descriptions of objects, Sarraute's writing is distinguished by

her use of dialogue,fragmentsof which she links with the ellipse, an important part of

her style that is evident not only sonically and linguistically, but also visually on the

page. While Robbe-Grillet is highly critical of the use of metaphor, associating it with a

humanistic approach that he opposes, Sarraute's writing makes frequent use of these

comparisons, a quality that grows out of the very spirit of her project, created on the basis

of writing that is especially attuned to the sounds and textures of language, its poetic

qualities. Both writers are concerned with developing new approaches to

characterization, which, following in the footsteps of their linking of the need for shifts in

literature to broader societal transformations, they tie to the alterations that have taken

place in the role of the subject. Yet Sarraute puts this question at the forefront of her

fiction, making it into an organizing principle of her novels, while Robbe-Grillet's

experiments in this regard are more modest. Finally, both are critical of traditional

approaches to depth in the novel, yet Robbe-Grillet' s objectivism tries to put this stance

into practice in his fiction, whereas Sarraute's writing depends on a distinction between

conscious and subconscious that is reminiscent of a psychoanalytic model.

The work of Robbe-Grillet holds special importance for Saer, yet the scientific

sensibility of the most outspoken member of the group diverges from Saer's own

predilections. By contrast, in Nathalie Sarraute he finds an experimental novelist who

shares his interest in fiction that uses poetic language and the relationship between poetry

77
and prose. The biographical parallels between Sarraute and Saer should not be excluded

from a consideration of the points of contact between them. Like Saer, Sarraute was an

immigrant to France; he camefromArgentina, shefroma small town outside of Moscow,

where she was born in 1900. In this sense as well, she is an exceptional member of the

nouveau roman, almost all of whom were born and raised in France. While Saer often

seeks to minimize biographical elements in his study of an author's work, his consistent

interest in emigre writers2 makes the parallel between his situation and that of Sarraute an

intriguing part of the overall equation of the literary connections between them.

According to a reading that links these two writers, we can make certain

observations about the differences between the work of Robbe-Grillet on one hand as

opposed to Sarraute and Saer on the other. Saer and Sarraute build novels out of

language that gives form to "momentos particulares de la consciencia" (Saer 61) more

than dramatic narratives or the development of a central character. Sarraute coins the

term tropism to describe these moments, or pre-linguistic inner "movements" (Sarraute,

8), thus simultaneously creating a highly original fictional world and a theoretical

language which also describes Saer's literary project built up out of these component

parts. Instead of a novel founded on the idea of a masternarrative, in Sarraute's tropisms

Saer finds a model for fiction constructed from elements that are more precise, particular

and local.

This attention to detail relates to the broader question of the relationship between

prose and poetry, which Saer and Sarraute explore in both their criticism and fiction.

Unlike Saer, Sarraute did not publish any collections of poetry; instead, her creation of

2
His essays onfigureslike James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Witold Gombrowicz, and Alfred Ebelot
suffice to make the point.
78
several works for the theatre continued her experimentation with dialogue. She often

questioned the sharp division between poetry and prose: "I've always thought that there

is no border, no separation, between poetry and prose. Michaux, is he prose or poetry?

Or Francis Ponge? It's written in prose, yet it's poetry, because it's the sensation that is

carried across by means of the language" (Sarraute interview, 147).3 In the opening line

of the foreword to Tropisms, Sarraute acknowledges that some consider her text "a

collection of prose poems" (Sarraute, 7).4 Indeed, the text is composed of twenty four

parts which read more like sketches than chapters of a novel. These vignettes, whose

absence of plot or character names makes them almost impossible to connect using

traditional reading conventions, are consistent with Saer's project. Although he never

accomplished it, several times he expressed a desire to write an entire novel in verse.5 He

also states more than once that he wants to write prose with the greatest degree of

condensation possible and poetry with the greatest degree of distribution possible,6 a

project that leads us to read some of his novels as prose poems. Thus he sees his poetry

and prose as connected, part of the broader tapestry of his whole literary corpus.7 With

3
From Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers (1991). The interview was performed
in French and then translated into English by the author and interviewer. I employ his English translation
here since the original French version was not published.
4
1 cite this passage in English since I have been unable to find an original French version of this preface. I
will continue with this practice.
5
In Juan Jose Saerpor Juan Jose Saer he remarks "La idea de la novela en verso esta siempre presente,
pero las dificultades de realizacidn son muchas" (Saer, 21).
6
In an interview with Guillermo Saavedra included in La curiosidad impertinente, Saer remarks
"tradicionalmente, en la poesia el procedimiento esencial es la condensacidn y en la prosa, el de
distribution. Mi objetivo es obtener en la poesia el mas alto grado de distribucidn y en la prosa el mas alto
grado de condensaci6n".
7
In "Fragmentos de un reportaje", included in the Historia de literatura Argentina, he writes: "En lineas
generates puede decirse que, a partir de 1960, mi trabajo literario ha consistido principalmente en tratar de
borrar lasfronterasentre narraci6n y poesia. Puesto que he venido escribiendo ambas cosas desde 1955,
pienso que la busqueda de esa sintesis es menos la consecuencia de preocupacionestecnicasque una
79
its attention to individual words, phrases and the sounds of language, Saer's work blurs

the boundary between prose and poetry. Sartre's call for the novelist to write in service

of a progressive political ideology is predicated upon a distinction between prose and

poetry; thus by blurring the boundary between these two forms of writing, Saer mounts a

challenge to Sartre's position. The act of reconsidering the way the relationship between

these two modes of writing is understood parallels Saer and Sarraute's questioning of the

divisions between fiction and non-fiction.

Their study of poetry and prose also goes hand in hand with Saer and Sarraute's

exploration of the connection between language and consciousness, which is at the heart

of Sarraute's tropisms, subtle and subconscious movements that transfer well to Saer's

writing. For example, in the piece "De una discusidn literaria," the narrator describes a

transformation that takes place in him and his interlocutors as a result of the literary

discussion they have over the course of seven hours. Yet just as quickly as he asserts this

alleged conversion he undercuts it with a statement of doubt as to whether it has truly

taken place. As in Sarraute's fiction, the problem these subtle states or transformations

pose for the narrator is intimately related to language: if he can't express the idea in

language, how can he be sure what he claims to experience has really occurred?

However, rather than weakening his text this doubt becomes the driving force behind it,

exemplifying the way Saer's work thrives on the literary potential of various forms of

uncertainty.

Without opening a larger discussion which the complex question of gender would

deserve and entail, I would simply like to touch on the two author's views of this topic,

aspiracidn personal a la unidad y a la construcci6n de un discurso unico: este ultimo rasgo es, me parece, la
caracteristica fundamental de la literatura. Mi objetivo es combinar elrigorformal de la narration moderna
con la intensidad de percepcidn po&ica del mundo."
80
especially since it reveals an interesting parallel between them. Although Sarraute's

work is often taken up by critics in terms of ecriture feminine? both Saer and Sarraute

reject this approach. Saer follows Sarraute's assessment of her own work in terms of its

aesthetic value as literature, rather than a gendered kind of writing. As he comments in

the context of an essay on the work of Katherine Ann Porter,

Como otras grandes escritoras de nuestro siglo, Virginia Woolf, Nathalie

Sarraute, Ana Ajmatova, Carson McCullers, en las que la problematica feminista
esta desde luego implicita, la obra de Katherine Ann Porter no se ocupa de una
supuesta especificidad feminina, sino de lo humano en tanto que tal. Reducir su
obra (o la de Virginia Woolf por ejemplo), a una dimension exclusivamente
feminista seria tan absurdo como reducir el Quijote a una problematica puramente
castellana. La toma de conciencia de una muchachita de diez aflos y su dolorosa
entrada en el mundo adulto encarna la experiencia de cada uno de sus lectores,
cualquiera sea el sexo, su raza o su cultura (Saer, La narracion-objeto, 86-7).

The parallel he draws here between the categories of nation and gender is intriguing, and

demonstrates how his commentary on the question of gender is part of his broader

emphasis on universalism. Sarraute is consistent in rejecting the notion of ecriture

feminine, despite being one of the few women associated with the nouveau roman:9

'"Quandj' £cris,jene suisnihommeni femmeni chienni chat...'" (Jefferson, 96);

"'C6st une grave erreur, surtout pour les femmes, que de parler d'ecriture feminine ou

masculine.. .il n'y'a que des ecritures tout court'" (Jefferson, 97). Saer takes the same

position in evaluating the work of Sarraute and Katherine Ann Porter, applying his

universalist notion of literature to their work. Seeing an approach to texts by these

writers in terms of gender as reductionist, Saer instead prioritizes their aesthetic qualities.

Nevertheless, in spite of their best intentions, at certain moments the question of gender

8
Works by Sarah Barbour (Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader: Identities in Process) and
Catherine M. Peebles (Psyche ofFeminism: Sand, Collette, Sarraute) suffice to make the point.
9
The other being Marguerite Duras
81
enters into the fiction of both writers in ways that complicate their avowedly gender-

neutral, universalist stance. For example the character who dares to critique the glorified

novel in Sarraute's Lesfruitsd'or is a woman who is vilified for her stance and

discredited in terms that evoke stereotypes of her gender. Still, as Saer argues, it would

be a mistake to read Sarraute's fiction exclusively along these lines, since this would

entail a reduction of its complexity.

I will organize my discussion of the connections between the work of Sarraute

and Saer into four inter-related sections: first, Sarraute's views on literature and what

Saer takes from them; then, Saer's use of Sarraute's concept of the tropism as a tool to

critique narrative totalization; next, his translation of Sarraute's Tropisms as a laboratory

for elements that he employs in his own fiction, taking his "La Mayor" as an exemplary

case in point; and finally, consider Saer's Lo Imborrable (1993) and Sarraute's Entre la

vie et la mort (1968) and Lesfruitsd'or (1963) as three novels that interrogate the role of

the writer in a capitalist and media-dominated society.

Sarraute's views on literature

Four essays, collected together under the title L 'Ere du soupcon and published in

French literary journals in the 1940's and 50's together give valuable insight into

Sarraute's difficult, challenging fiction and provide a sense of her aesthetic philosophy.

With the objective of forging an original and highly personal language, these essays are

written in the same rigorous prose as her fiction. They reveal a writer who places the

highest value on innovation and whose chief concern is to push literature forward, to

create new literary techniques. In particular they show a drive to create a certain

experience for the reader, compelling him to enter into the text in a more vigorous

82
fashion than in the realist novel. Yet this does not occur through emotional identification

with the characters or anticipation of what will happen next in the narrative, but rather, in

a focus that links Sarraute to the values of an avant-garde tradition, through a process by

which the reader is challenged and puzzled, obliged to grapple with the text and accept its

gaps, ambiguity and uncertainty. The spirit of this challenge to the reader is not a playful

one, like that of Julio Cortazar or Macedonio Fernandez, whose texts obligate the reader

to participate in their construction, but rather more confrontational and even aggressive in

tone.

I will consider the essays in the order in which they were published, following the

collection L 'Ere du soupcon: Essais sur le roman (1956). In "De Dostoievski a Kafka,"

(1947) Sarraute creates a literary genealogy that links these two writers, arguing against

the conventional view that the work of the German novelist represents a break from the

psychological novel paradigm of the Russian. In a description that sounds strongly

reminiscent of her own concept of the tropism, Sarraute credits the Russian master with

employing the same kind of subtle interior movements which are also the building blocks

of Kafka's works. Furthermore, the works of both writers are centered around the theme

of what she calls, taking the phrase from Katherine Mansfield, "this terrible desire to

establish contact" (Sarraute, 71). Yet while this contact is established in many of

Dostoyevsky's novels, his one text where this fails to occur, Notesfromthe

Underground, Sarraute claims, creates a particular link with Kafka, since in his works

these attempts, although they are often claims for recognition rather than contact,

generally fail.

83
 In the title piece, "L'Ere du soupcon," (1950) an influential essay, widely

considered to be one of the foundational essays of the nouveau roman, which Saer

references several times in his works of criticism,10 published for the first time in the

journal "Temps Modernes" in 1950, Sarraute, writing in the same dense and highly

metaphorical language that characterizes her fiction, argues that the trust that had marked

the relationship between reader and writer during the heyday of the realist novel in the

nineteenth century has been replaced by a mutual mistrust or suspicion. Yet, rather than

lamenting this shift, Sarraute presents suspicion as a virtue that has become the

cornerstone of a new model for the novel. Her argument is not so much normative as

descriptive, particularly of her own highly personal and original literary project. Central

to her views is the claim that the novel has undergone a transformation not only with

regard to plot and time, but especially in terms of the role that character plays. As a

result of the innovations of major figures Joyce, Freud and Proust, the novel is no longer

built around a central heroic character who is described from the outside and who grows

and changes as a result of his experiences, but is now nameless and anonymous,

represented from a first person narrative style, in an attempt to focus attention on the

character's psychology rather than his identity. Since, almost in spite of himself, the

reader tends to connect what he reads with his own personal experience and to interpret

the characters in a novel in terms of certain preconceived categories or types, the novelist

In an interview with Gerard De Cortanze he remarks: "Es cierto que muchos narradores del siglo XX han
escrito contra el realismo. Asi, por ejemplo, ciertas pdginas reveladoras de Nathalie Sarraute, en La era del
recelo. Pero si Nathalie Sarraute critica el uso actual de procedimientos del siglo XDC, lo hace porque
considera que esos procedimientos son estereotipados, vacios, insignificantes, y lo que ella les reprocha es
no tanto ser realistas sino irreales" (Saer, 284-5). In "Notas sobre el nouveau roman", he writes "Frente a
esta actitud creadora existe una tradici6n balzaciana que es, en suma, una falsa tradicion y una letra muerta.
Nathalie Sarraute ha demostrado, en La era de la sospecha (interesting use of different translation each
time), el caracter formalista de sus procedimientos" (Saer, 177).
84
must write in such a way to prevent him from falling into these traps and force him into

the author's created world.

Saer draws on many of these ideas to construct his own views on literature. First,

he shares Sarraute's belief in the importance for a writer of developing her own

personalized language and literary aesthetic. As he remarks, "todo escritor debe fundar

su propia estetica" (Saer 267). Second, this attitude of stubborn refusal and resistance,

this deliberate withholding of some key quality in order to create tension and frustration

rather than satisfaction is a quality that Saer remarks upon as a virtue in his own writing.

For example, in the closing lines of his important essay "Una literatura sin atributos", he

states, "un escritor debe negarse a representor, como escritor, cualquier tipo de intereses

ideol6gicos y dogmas esteticos o politicos" (Saer 267, my italics). Third, the objective of

challenging the reader and forcing him to read in new ways by taking away from him the

usual points of reference that he leans and depends on when reading is yet another central

tenet in Saer's approach to literature. We see this concept in his work, from his

admiration for Macedonio Fernandez's construction of a novel out of a series of

prologues that forever delay and frustrate the reader's expectation of an actual narrative

that never begins to the use of gaps and uncertainty in his own fiction. Furthermore, his

frequent reference to Musil's The Man Without Qualities11 as a metaphor for the role of

the author is reminiscent of Sarraute's objective of building novels around characters who

are in some sense anonymous; even while Saer uses this concept to describe the author,

while Sarraute stresses the characters, their common use of the notion of emptiness for

11
In "Una literatura sin atributos," he remarks "el escritor debe ser, segiin las palabras de Musil, un
'hombre sin atributos," es decir un hombre que no se Uena como un espantapajaros con un pufiado de
certezas adquiridas o dictadas por la presidn social, sino que rechaza a priori toda determinacidn" (Saer,
267). In "Genealogia del hombre sin atributos," he links Musil's novel to an ancient Chinese Buddhist
concept and to the work of Samuel Beckett.
85
subjectivity is noteworthy. The violent quality in Sarraute's language is also typical of

Saer, who shares her belief that a tightly controlled and graphic use of language can serve

as a metaphor for rigor and a way of creating tension in a narrative or a piece of prose

fiction. Perhaps the best example of this tendency in Sarraute's essay is her description

of the relationship of author to reader, as the former tries to compel the latter to relinquish

his attachment to certain conventional devices in a narrative: "II est plong£ et maintenu

jusqu'au bout dans une matiere anonyme comme le sang, dans un magma sans nom, sans

contours" (Sarraute 74). Saer's own writing is shot through with lines that recall this type

of ferocious, tense imagery. Additionally, the question of knowing what to expect

beforehand in a work of literature as opposed to being surprised, in a moment of

spontaneity, by what one finds there and being challenged to read it on its own terms

without preconceptions is also of crucial importance to both writers. For Saer and

Sarraute the experience of reading a work of literature should go against the grain of the

reader's expectations and force him into new territory. This idea emerges especially in

Sarraute's Entre la vie et la mort and Lesfruits d'or and Saer refers to it in his essays.

For Saer, as for Sarraute, the aesthetic experience is "un modo radical de libertad" (Saer,

265), a freedom which requires the absence of preconceptions that create the conditions

for the possibility of a rigorous and open-minded13 encounter between reader or viewer

and art work.

12
For example he concludes the essay "Narrathon" with the following image of his ideal reader: "Que
nuestro lector sea como el hombre que, encaminandose hacia una catastrofe oye, repetidas veces, y desde la
oscuridad, un llamado, que lo inquieta, lo desvia, lo demora, y le hace, porfin,cambiar la direccidn de su
marcha para dedicarse a buscar, en la oscuridad, la fuente de la que ese llamado puede provenir—sin que
tenga que haber, necesariamente, en algiin lugar de la oscuridad, una fuente" (Saer, 151). Without entering
into a more detailed analysis of this admittedly fascinating and enigmatic description, the image of the
walker changing direction suffices to demonstrate Saer's objective of transforming the reader.
13
The term "authenticity" would not be consistent with Saer's literary aesthetic.
86
 In "Conversation et sous-conversation," published in the Nouvelle Revue

Francaise in 1956, Sarraute argues that dialogue is a domain wherefictionhas an

advantage over film and journalism, and thus a site novelists should concentrate on in

order to develop the genre. Dialogue has begun to take the place of action in the novel.

While the traditional novel insists on clearly distinguishing dialoguefromnon-dialogue,

the modern novel often dispenses with these devices, such as indentation, dash, colon,

quotation marks and the "he said, she said" convention. In a comment that reveals the

ideological meaning Sarraute attaches to this shift, she remarks "C'est qu'elles sont en

quelque sorte le symbole de l'ancien regime, le point ou se separent avec le plus de

nettete la nouvelle et Pancienne conception du roman" (Sarraute, 108). She sees these

devices as constantly reminding the reader of the presence of the author and impeding

himfrominvolving himself more deeply in the text. Sarraute sees theatrical dialogue as a

place for novelists to look for possible directions to take, since this type of dialogue "est

plus ramasse\ plus dense, plus tendu et survolte" que le dialogue romanesque" (Sarraute,

112). While she admires Proust on many counts, she critiques him for constantly

injecting his authorial voice to comment upon and explain the dialogue in his fiction

rather than allowing it to stand on its own. In this sense, as much as she associates his

work with what she calls the modern novel, it retains this tendencyfromthe nineteenth

century realist tradition. Instead, she wants to find a technique that "parviendrait a

plonger le lecteur dans le flot de ces drames souterrains que Proust n'a eu le temps que

de survoler.. .une technique qui donnerait au lecteur l'illusion de refaire lui-meme ces

actions" (Sarraute, 118). As in the other essays, we see her efforts concentrated on the

experience of the reader, and her description of "plonger le lecteur dans le flot de ces

87
drames souterrains" (my italics) once again suggests a need to force him to engage with

the text, using language that has violent undertones. Rather than presenting her own

fiction as exemplifying the ideal direction for dialogue in the contemporary novel,

Sarraute instead points to the work of one Ivy Compton-Burnett, an English novelist who

wrote about English nobility between 1880-1900. Sarraute remarks that Compton-

Burnett's work negotiates the "limitefluctuantequi separe la conversation de la sous-

conversation. . .Un jeu serre, subtil, feroce, se joue entre la conversation et la sous-

conversation" (Sarraute 122). The conversation represents the words that are actually

spoken by the characters, while the sub-conversation, in a term that recalls Freud's notion

of the subconscious, is similar to Sarraute's notion of the tropisms, or inner movements

that precede, action, speech and even thought. Sarraute remarks that these conversations

don't resemble ones that we have heard, though they are nevertheless convincing on a

literary level; thus, unlike Saer, her project is not to render daily speech patterns.

Compton-Burnett instead created a new kind of dialogue that functions on its own terms.

Furthermore, in a comment that reveals the value she places on tension and an

atmosphere of peril, Sarraute remarks, "un danger dissimule dans ces phrases douceatres,

des impulsions meurtrieres s'insinuent dans 1'inquietude affecteuse, une expression de

tendresse distille tout a coup un subtil venin" (Sarraute 122). Sarraute admires Compton-

Burnett's dialogue for the dangerous energy hidden beneath the surface of apparently

benevolent remarks.

In "Ce qui voient les oiseaux," (1956) Sarraute distinguishes between two kinds

of writers, the formalists, who produce works that garner praise and attention when

produced, but then prove to be of inferior quality over time, and the realists, who produce

88
great works of literature that endure. The title of the essay is a reference to what happens

when readers go back over works of literature that impressed them on a first reading: "la

meme sensation penible que devaient eprouver les oiseaux qui tentaient de picorer les

fameux raisins de Zeuxis. Ce qu'ils voient n'est plus qu'un trompe-l'oeil. Une plate et

inerte copie" (Sarraute 132). Sarraute very deliberately inverts the typical use of these

two terms, reserving the term realists for those she considers to create the more complex

body of literature when it is typically used to describe the work of those she has called

formalists. The process that she traces regarding the vagaries in the critical reception of

the formalist works clearly coincides with the plot of her novel Lesfruitsd'or, which I

will discuss in greater detail in a later section this chapter. While the formalist works

conform to conventions, realist works are more complex. Furthermore, while one can

read the formalist texts once and not feel the need to return to them, the realist texts

"supportent d'etre relus" (Sarraute 139). The formalist writers draw upon pre-established

methods, but the realist writers, finding that these methods are insufficient for the

complexity of the reality they are trying to describe, "les rejette alors sans hesiter et

s'efforce d'en trouver de nouvelles, destinees a son propre usage. Peu lui importe

qu'elles d&oncertent ou irritent d'abord les lecteurs" (Sarraute 141-2). In addition to the

value placed on the discovery of new literary techniques, this absolute devotion to art is

especially reminiscent of Saer's attitude to literature. As he states in "Una literatura sin

atributos," "creo que un escritor en nuestra sociedad, sea cual fuere su nacionalidad, debe

negarse a representar, como escritor, cualquier tipo de intereses ideologicos y dogmas

esteticos o politicos, aun cuando eso lo condene a la marginalidady a la oscuridad''

(Saer 267, my italics). Both writers share the acceptance of the frustration of the reader,

89
failure in the marketplace and poor critical recognition as costs of prioritizing the text as

a work of art. Furthermore, Sarraute distinguishes between the beautiful prose of the

formalists, and the more economical, practical and efficient style of the realists, which is

beautiful in its own way: "d'autant plus beau qu'il est mieux adapte a sa fin. Sa beauts,

faite de vigueur, de precision, de vivacite, de souplesse, de hardiesse et d'economie des

moyens, n'est que l'expression de son efficacit£" (Sarraute 143). Himself a writer who

pays careful attention to style, Saer has also often made this distinction, in particular

critiquing those who place excessive value on the beauty of prose at the expense of rigor

and complexity. Finally, in a surprising turn for a writer who rarely engages this topic,

Sarraute closes her essay with a commentary on how the distinction she has drawn

between these two types of writers relates to the question of commitment, arguing that

the realist works will ultimately have a more revolutionary effect than the formalist ones:

"leurs oeuvres, qui cherchent a se degager de tout ce qui est impose, conventionnel et

mort, pour se tourner vers ce qui est libre, sincere et vivant, seront forcement t6t ou tard

des levains d'emancipation et de progres" (Sarraute 154). In contrast to Saer, who rejects

the notion that literature can be an agent of reform, Sarraute's position instead echoes

Adorno's claim that modernist works have a revolutionary capability that realist14 works

lack.

These essays highlight certain points of contrast between the two writers,

particularly with respect to their approach to dialogue and characterization. While

Sarraute, following in the footsteps of Compton-Burnett, has her characters speak in

somewhat stylized language, created to fit the literary world in which they move, yet

14
Her definition of the term "realist" is not the same as the more common usage of the term that Adorno
employs.
90
credible to the reader, Saer's characters employ a much more colloquial form of speech.

His attention to daily speech patterns and effort to capture them in his fiction, although in

a way that is far from the tradition of costumbrismo, is evident. Moreover, they also take

divergent approaches to characterization. Both writers break from the use of character in

the realist novel, yet they accomplish the task in different ways. Sarraute makes her

characters anonymous, stripping them of qualities that the reader depends upon to

identify and connect emotionally with them. Saer, on the other hand, does provide his

characters with names, traces back their life histories and often gives them psychological

depth. Yet his novels are organized around philosophical ideas rather than the

development of a character, as in the bildungsroman tradition. Instead, Saer's novels

frequently parody these conventions, particularly psychoanalytical readings of behavior.

Moreover, by creating large casts of characters, as in his final novel La grande, Saer

critiques the realist novel whose narrative rests on the development of a single figure who

lends his name to the title. He also consistently draws attention to the highly mediated

quality of the information in his novels, which emphasizes the importance of perspective

and subjectivity, and critiques the notion of an objective truth, an assumption which the

conventional realist novel is built upon.

At the same time, Saer picks up on several ideas from Sarraute and uses them to

develop him own literary philosophy. First, he employs the concept of suspicion as a

virtue that can function as a cornerstone for creating tension in narrative fiction, in

addition to describing a new relationship between reader and writer. Second, the

distinction that Sarraute draws between realist and formalist texts could be taken as

91
corresponding to Saer's distinction between "poeta oficial" and "verdadero poeta," or

his distinction between popular writers who produce best-sellers and more lasting ones,

as we see in Lo Imborrable. As much as their concerns may be associated with

postmodernism, Saer and Sarraute do not share the collapse of high and popular culture

that is often considered the most characteristic element of this movement, since they

preserve a division between what they consider texts of high literary and aesthetic quality

as opposed to those they see as secondary in this regard. Moreover they attempt to justify

this distinction not only on the basis of personal taste, but also on rational grounds.

Finally, like Sarraute, Saer prioritizes aesthetic concerns above nearly all others; rather

than simply disregarding market success and the satisfaction of desires of the reading

public, they write intentionally in the face of them, accepting marginality and obscurity

as a justified cost of this sacrifice.

Critique of the totalizing masternarrative: Saer's use of Sarraute's concept

of the tropism
Known mainly as a novelist, Saer was also an active practitioner of the short

story, many of which are structured around moments that recall Sarraute's sketches. His

collection La Mayor, published originally in 1976, contains a section called

"Argumentos," composed of twenty-eight short pieces written between 1969-1975, in the

years just after his publication of the translation of Sarraute's text in 1968. Robbe-

Grillet's interest in this format is revealed by his publication of Instantanes, one of which

Saer translated and published in a small journal in Santa Fe before moving to Paris in

1968.16

15
From his essay "Literature y crisis Argentina."
16
His translation of Robbe-Grillet's "La plage" as "La playa" is published in the October 1967 edition of
the journal Setecientosmonos.
92
 A strong case can be made that in these short texts Saer draws upon Sarraute's

concept of the tropism to mount a challenge to the tyranny of masternarratives. His use

of titles like La mayor and La grande reveal an intentional parody of all types of

totalizing novels, which for him includes not only ambitious realist novels of the

nineteenth century, but also the encyclopedic works of boom writers like Fuentes, Garcia

Marquez and Vargas Llosa. On the whole, unlike these novels, Saer's works do not make

attempts to represent a Latin American or an Argentine reality. Saer remarks upon the

problems of the totalizing masternarrative in connection with totalitarian forms of

government in his essay "Literatura y crisis Argentina:"

Si aceptamos la definicion de literatura oficial como toda aquella literatura que es

excedida y englobada por el sistema de pensamiento al que
adscribe...comprenderemos de inmediato que literatura oficial no es solamente la
que adhiere a la ideologia de un Estado, sino tambien a la de cualquier sistema de
pensamiento que se pretende totalizador (Saer, 96).

For Saer "literatura oficial" is not only literature that promotes state politics, but rather

any text that is totalizing. According to this argument, a novel that is not explicitly

political could still reinforce establishment political views. As I will explore in greater

detail in a later section of this chapter, his novel Lo imborrable provides an excellent

example of this claim. However, this is not to say that the novels of the boom writers

mentioned above exemplify "literatura oficial" or conservative politics for Saer, since not

every work of fiction that has a totalizing quality fits into this category. In Saer's hands,

the tropism becomes both a practical technique and a metaphor for the local, the

particular and the small, which poses a challenge to sweeping and large-scale master-

narratives. If we see these ambitious novels as embodying a broader national

93
consciousness, Saer's use of the tropism is part of his attack on nationalism, a position

which emerges throughout his work.

In the section of the collection La mayor, called "Argumentos," which are not so

much short stories as sketches, Saer once again draws from Sarraute's interest in the

miniature. Both create literary worlds not from heroic events on a large scale, but rather

out of detailed descriptions of apparently mundane daily events, exposing the hidden life

buried under the surface of these moments. Much as Sarraute's text is composed of

sections that have no clear connections via traditional elements like plot or character,

Saer's "Argumentos" are short texts that are often linked only by references to similar

themes or questions. One piece, "Discusion sobre el termino zona" describes a

conversation between two friends, Lalo Lescano and Pichon Garay, in which they debate

the meaning of Garay's statement that "un hombre debe ser siempre fiel a una region, a

una zona" (Saer, 184). The fragment leaves the reader mystified since he gets only a

glimpse into an intriguing world that ends suddenly and cryptically. Another piece, "Me

llamo Pichon Garay", simply introduces in a few short paragraphs, this character who

will be a central part of Saer's future novels. Yet another text, "El viajero" is a prose-

poem that recalls Saer's unfulfilled objective of writing a novel in verse. This piece

reads like prose, but the lines have the terseness of poetry and are broken up into sections

that give it a fragmented visual quality on the page.

Sarraute's notion of the tropism could also be taken as a metaphor for Saer's

particular approach to space. Rather than making national or continental claims, his

fiction is founded upon detailed representation of a highly localized space, the Santa Fe

region of Argentina and often the city of Santa Fe itself. While other Argentinian writers
17
Saer does not mention specific titles or authors that exemplify the national consciousness he has in mind.
94
have concentrated on their own city, Saer's project is exceptional in two ways. First, in

his use of Santa Fe and the surrounding region in particular as the center of a literary

universe and second, rather than depicting characters as typical figures from this region,

as in the school of costumbrismo, by portraying them in a more grounded and less

exoticized manner. His approach to geography and space in his fiction is in some sense

reminiscent of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, with its repeating characters and

interlinked stories that connect the novels, yet it does not strive to represent a region of

Argentina any more than it does the nation itself. His work is far from the regionalist

novels from the 1920's and 30's, the so-called novela de la tierra. By contrast, in his

highly detailed attention to local speech patterns and locales (bars, restaurants, streets), a

quality that we might associate with the poetic dimension of his writing, he creates a

world that is just as particular spatially as in its focus on moments in daily life. In this

sense, his writing creates a Sarrautian tropism in time and space.

Translation and creation: Sarraute's Tropisms and Saer's "La Mayor"

Saer's piece "La Mayor" has intrigued readers and attracted considerable attention

from critics, who tend to see it as a moment of particularly radical experimentation with

form in the broader trajectory of his fiction. One critic has traced some of the elements in
1 ft

this text to the influence of Robbe-Grillet, an argument that represents a broader trend

in the criticism on Saer. In the few places where critics develop the connections between

his work and the nouveau roman with any depth, the tendency is to emphasize the work

of Robbe-Grillet, which is consistent with the broader trend towards thinking that the

movement begins and ends with the work of its most outspoken figure. Yet this approach
18
Myrna Solotorevsky, '"La Mayor' de Juan Jose" Saer y el efecto modelizador del Nouveau Roman"
95
neglects the ties between Saer and other, less well-knownfiguresfrom the movement.

Thus, while "La Mayor" may indeed show parallels with Robbe-Grillet, it also reveals

the imprint of Saer's interest in the work of Nathalie Sarraute, particularly herfirstwork

Tropisms, which makes sense since Saer translated this text into Spanish. He even

alludes to a translation of Sarraute briefly in a novel that appears much later, Lo

Imborrable: "la noche que la conoci habia terminado un libro de Natalie Sarraute que, lo

supimos m&s tarde, ya habia salido meses antes en una edicion espanola" (Saer, 62).

This cannot be Saer's translation of Sarraute since the novel is set in 1979-80, whereas

his translation was published in 1968; nevertheless, the reference shows him weaving his

relationship with Sarraute explicitly into one of his works of fiction. Saer's translation of

Sarraute's text is published in 1968, while he writes his own "La Mayor" in 1972, a

chronological proximity that supports the connections between the two works.

Sarraute, bora in 1900, began to write before the other nouveaux romanciers, yet,

unlike Robbe-Grillet, her work was slow to receive recognition. Herfirsttext, Tropisms,

written between 1932 and 1937, wasfinallypublished in 1939. Yet, it attracted relatively

little attention at the time and only came to be studied more carefully once her reputation

was more established following the publication of L 'Ere du soupqon in 1956. Saer

moved from Argentina to Paris on a scholarship in 1968, and that same year published a

translation into Spanish of Sarraute's text. This suggests he most likely started the

translation in Argentina, thereby showing that his interest in the work of Sarraute

predates his move to France rather than growing out of it.

The title of the text is a term that Sarraute coined to describe certain prelinguistic,

subconscious states which she considers "to constitute the secret source of our existence,

96
in what might be called its nascent state" (Sarraute 8). Yet, in Sarraute's fiction a tropism

refers just as much to a fragment as a prelinguistic or subconscious moment; we might

think of the text as a whole as a collection of these fragments assembled together like

pieces to form a mosaic. Sarraute frequently employs the ellipse to capture what sound

like interior monologues, yet they are generally pieces of conversation which are either

being recorded by the narrative voice or have been internalized and are echoing in a

given character's consciousness. In either case, though, tropisms are not like the interior

monologues of modernist writers like Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf, where we hear a

character's thoughts in afreeassociation like approach, or even have access to their

emotional life that precedes language. Since the young Saer was searching for ways to

breathe new life into the novel form, it is not surprising that he would find a kindred soul

in Sarraute and see her work as offering a possible model for directions that he was

interested in pursuing in his future novels.

Saer also takes a similar position to Sarraute regarding the question of the

relationship between theory and fiction, a topic that emerges again and again throughout

the writings of both Saer and the nouveau roman writers. Like Sarraute, Saer asserts that

the fiction always takes precedence over the theory. In the concluding section of his

essay, he puts the point in the following terms: "Debemos juzgar a los narradores por sus

narraciones, no por sus teorias. Y se pueden escribir buenas narraciones aun sustentando

teorias err6neas" (Saer 178). In her prologue to Tropisms Sarraute is at pains to refute

the claim that her novels are laboratory experiments aimed at illustrating certain

theoretical principles. On the contrary, she claims, the fiction always comes first; she

produces the theory after having written the fiction, in an attempt to explain in analytical

97
language what she has tried to accomplish in her novels. For his part, Robbe-Grillet

makes a similar point in an essay aimed at correcting some of what he perceives as

misunderstandings of the nouveau roman: "Mais nous...qu'on accuse d'etre des

theoriciens...nous savons seulement que le roman d'aujourd'hui sera ce que nous le

ferons, aujourd'hui, et que nous n'avons pas a cultiver la ressemblance avec ce qu'il etait

hier, mais a nous avancer plus loin" (Robbe-Grillet 115). While this is an interesting

position to take, it is impossible to divorce the theory from the fiction, and the theory

indeed takes on a life of its own, setting out questions that compel the active reader to use

and test out when reading the fiction. For writers who were also such active theorizers,

the relationship between theory and fiction takes on a particularly important meaning. In

some sense, although they want to cleanly separate the two, for both Saer and the

nouveau roman writers the boundary between theory and fiction is no less blurry than the

line between poetry and prose; their theory constantly bleeds into their fiction, and vice

versa. The later section of Tropisms where the narrative voice remarks upon the

anachronism of the realist model is a great case in point, since Sarraute makes this same

argument in her essay "L'ere du soupcon."

Like the majority of the nouveaux romans, Sarraute's Tropisms is a peculiar text

when compared to the traditional type of realist novel of the nineteenth century. The

characters are never named and as a result we do not know if the figures whose actions

are described and dialogue transcribed in each chapter are the same ones as in the

previous chapters. Furthermore, the text lacks a discernible plot or unifying thread of

action to follow from chapter to chapter. For these reasons, like the works of Robbe-

Grillet, this text poses a particular challenge to the reader, as Sarraute intended. The

98
majority of Tropisms is devoted to what reads as a parody of the privileged daily life of

members of the French bourgeoisie. In a tone reminiscent of T.S Eliot's The Wasteland,

Sarraute mocks the monotonous and superficial daily routines of these characters.

Moreover, it makes sense that in one version of the text it was published together with

L 'Ere du soupqon, since the theoretical concerns that Sarraute expresses there emerge in

her fictional work in several key moments:

lis etaient laids, ils etaient plats, communs, sans personnalite, ils dataient vraiment
trop, des cliches, pensait-elle, qu'elle avait vus deja tant de fois decrits partout,
dans Balzac, Maupassant, dans Madame Bovary, des cliches, des copies, la copie
d'une copie, pensait-elle (Sarraute 133)

The text critiques French novelists who continue to imitate the great writers from the

nineteenth century when those models are no longer relevant. Rather than trying to

invent new forms appropriate for the times in which they are writing, these writers are

content to recycle the same tired old techniques.

Seeking to liberate the genre of the novel from these stultifying patterns, Saer

looks to translation as one possible source of innovation. In addition to his essays on the

work of Robbe-Grillet, the nouveau roman, sociological criticism, and avant-garde

traditions, Saer's translation of Sarraute's text and his introductory statement to it

regarding his approach to the translation can be taken as yet another point where his

encounter with this group of writers emerges directly and concretely, thus providing a

window onto the meaning of this dialogue. Together with his rendering into Spanish of

Robbe-Grillet's short piece "La Plage," his version of Sarraute's text testifies to

translation as one of the avenues through which he engaged directly with the nouveau

roman writers, particularly during the formative years of his career in the late sixties.

Interestingly, his only two published translations are the two mentioned here, of Robbe-

99
Grillet and Sarraute, suggesting that his relationship to translation goes hand in hand with

his rapport with the nouveaux romanciers. In what he calls the "advertencia del

traductor," Saer notes that Sarraute's prose created a challenge for him as a translator.

Summarizing two divergent strategies familiar to translators, he remarks that he could try

to maintain the literal meaning of the original text yet sacrifice some of its lyrical

qualities, or take certain liberties with the literal meanings of the original and instead find

equivalences in the target language (in this case Spanish). He opts for the second of these

possibilities: "Le ha parecido al traductor que, de las dos posibilidades, la segunda era la

mas Ml, la mas honesta, la mas rigurosa" (Saer 7). In this sense he takes an approach to

translating Sarraute that is similar to the one Jorge Luis Borges takes to translating a

variety of authors.19 The very inclusion of this commentary indicates Saer's awareness of

the complex questions involved in both the theory and the practice of translation.

The translator's introduction also provides insight into Saer's status as a writer at

the time with respect to that of Sarraute. An element of pride infuses the tone of the

subtitle underneath the title: "Tropismos (Con un pr61ogo especial para esta edition)."

In reality the prologue is essentially the same one that Sarraute included in translations of

her work into other languages, with a few notable exceptions, including a reference to the

translator: "Lapresente edicion, utilizada en su traduction por Juan Jose Saer, se

publico en Editions de Minuit en 1957" (Sarraute 12). Having little experience as a

translator—there is no evidence that he had any prior training in translation—Saer must

have leveraged the credibility he had established from his fiction to convince the

Editorial Galerna publishing house to allow him to translate this text. Considering this

lack of experience, translating Sarraute's complex, experimental text must have been a
19
See Efrafn Kristal's Invisible Work.
100
challenge for him. The young Saer, who had almost no experience translating

professionally at the time, was clearly proud and honored to have the chance to translate

an important text by an established and innovative writer from France whose work was

provoking particular interest and debate at the time.

Yet at the same time his highlighting of the translator's role illustrates the value

he places on this dimension of the work. Rather than covering over or ignoring his role

in the creation of the text, he draws attention to it. While this approach is a common

convention in translator's introductions, given that Saer is primarily a novelist, and that

the text it precedes is especially interested in questions of writing and self-reflexivity, his

introduction merits particular attention. His sensitivity to the ways that a translator

cannot help but transform the text, to the active and creative role of the translator, is part

of his broader interest in questions of authorship and representation. We can thus read

Saer's brief translator's introduction in connection with comments on discovered texts in

novels like Las nubes and Lapesquisa. Just as the act of writing is always problematic

for Saer given the complex dynamics involved in representation, so is the act of

translation. Neither writing nor translating, both creative processes, can ever be entirely

innocent or transparent. Thus, as a response, rather than hiding these considerations and

the role of the creator—as Saer views the realist novel doing—he instead chooses to

highlight and draw attention to them, both in his fiction as well as in his translation of

Sarraute. This approach is especially appropriate with respect to the work of Sarraute,

since her fiction consistently explores these same kinds of questions related to the

problems of representation.

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 In After Babel, George Steiner argues that translation does not occur simply

between languages, but rather should be expanded to embrace the process of

communication itself, even within a single language:

Interlingual translation is the main concern of this book, but it is also a way in, an
access to an inquiry into language itself. 'Translation', properly understood, is a
special case of the arc of communication which every successful speech-act
closes within a given language. On the inter-lingual level, translation will pose
concentrated, visibly intractable problems; but these same problems abound, at a
more covert or conventionally neglected level, intra-lingually. (49).

Steiner's expansion of the concept of translation beyond its literal meaning is especially

applicable to the work or Sarraute and Saer. This approach demonstrates how Sarraute's

very process of rendering tropisms, subtle inner movements, into language is itself an act

of translation. Her description of the creative process of searching for language

appropriate to capture these moments is not unlike the translator's search for words in the

target language that match the phrasings from the original one. Saer often speaks in a

similar fashion, suggesting that both he and Sarraute, although they don't say so

explicitly, view the writer of fiction who seeks to invent language adequate to capture

consciousness and experience, as a type of translator. Steiner's argument also provides a

valuable tool for connecting Saer's translation of Sarraute to the question and problems

of language that emerge throughout his fiction, showing that his early work as translator

of nouveau roman literature is consistent with the overarching concerns of his own

literary production.

Saer's introduction may also be taken as signaling an awareness of the importance

of translation in the work of Borges; since Saer was a careful and devoted reader of his

illustrious Argentine forebear, it would not be surprising that he would be aware of

Borges' intense activity as translator. Saer's comment about the non-literal nature of his

102
translation is consistent with his rendering of the text, since it introduces several

significant changes. In this sense, his translation of Sarraute is just as audacious as many

of Borges' translations.

Thanks in part to the work of Borges, in addition to other influential figures like

Victoria Ocampo, by the time Saer was rendering Sarraute's text from French to Spanish

in 1968, translation already had a lineage and a place in the world of Argentine letters. In

Borges and Translation, Sergio Waisman maps out the history of translation in

Argentina. He begins by tracing Borges' theory of translation back to the ninteenth

century when, he argues, D. F Sarmiento founded a tradition of textual appropriation by

consciously mistranslating and misquoting a line from a work by Diderot that he would

employ as the dedication to his foundational text of Argentine literature, Facundo.

Waisman then proceeds to trace this line through several other key moments-the

translation of texts during the avant-garde movements of the 1920's and 30's, translation

that took place in journals, and in particular the journal "Sur," headed by Victoria

Ocampo. The final moment he highlights is the presence of what he calls "foreign

visitors," when during the first half of the twentieth century Argentina was visited by

illustrious figures from a variety of nations; these included Dominican Pedro Henriquez

Urefia, Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, French writers Henri Michaux and

Andre Malraux, and Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz. Waisman seeks to demonstrate

that Argentina during this time was a place of complex mixing and blending that

provided a rich context for Borges' translations.

Yet the connection of translation to a tradition of "foreign visitors" to Argentina

in the twentieth century is also a useful tool that can allow us to expand our analysis of

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Saer's translation of Sarraute by connecting it to some of his other critical interests and

indeed to his view of the Argentine literary tradition. I have already noted that his

translation should be considered in connection with his interest in questions of

authorship, writing and textuality, which emerge almost obsessively in his novels. But

following Waisman, we can also inscribe this activity in a broader Argentine tradition of

exile, crossing and travel. Saer's fascination with this tradition of foreign visitors to his

home country is evidenced by the essays he wrote on a variety of these individuals,

including Gombrowicz, but also extending to nineteenth century figures Charles Darwin

and the French engineer Alfred Ebelot. As Saer notes, the presence of these figures in

Argentina is much better known within the southern cone nation than outside of it, a

testament to its peripheral position in the world republic of letters. The writings of these

authors have been incorporated into the canon of Argentine literature and local writers

frequently represent them as charismatic figures of near mythological proportions in their

own fiction. Saer's translation of Sarraute, far from being a separate or isolated activity,

can be connected to questions that interest him in his fiction and his criticism—the

relationship between periphery and margin, questions of displacement and travel, all of

which impact and inflect perception—as well as to a broader Argentine tradition of

crossing, and intercultural and inter-linguistic encounters. Following in the footsteps of

Borges, Saer sees the Argentine literary tradition as inextricably linked to the broader

tradition of world literature, which he views as constructed according to the struggles and

tensions between center and periphery, between what he calls "literatura oficial" and

"literatura verdadera."20 Moreover, it is a tradition that constantly challenges and blurs

genre boundaries, as typified by the work of eccentric figures working from the margins,
20
See "Literatura y crisis Argentina."
104
like Macedonio Fernandez, Juan L. Ortiz, Ezequeiel Martinez Estrada, Antonio di

Benedetto.

The almost total indifference to Saer's translation of Sarraute in the criticism

reflects not only a certain attitude towards his relationship to the nouveau roman, but also

to the process of translation generally, exemplifying Lawrence Venuti's claims regarding

the translator's "invisibility." One can make the claim that the importance of Sarraute for

Saer's work has been underestimated in large part because the significance of his

translation of her has been overlooked. The silence of critics with respect to this text

implies that they see translation as a marginal activity for a writer to take up, irrelevant to

his central concerns. Against this view, both the very decision to translate her, and the

manner in which he performs the translation, are related to Saer's overall literary project.

Saer's translation of Sarraute exemplifies the standard idea that every translation is an act

of negotiation between two languages and cultures. We can take this action as indicative

of a belief that Argentine readers21 should know about and have access to an important

early work by this seminal French woman writer of the twentieth century. The fact that

he did not go on to translate other works by Sarraute, or to perform other book-length

translations, does not detract from the importance of his decision to translate this text—

and to do so at this very crucial early juncture in his career as a writer. On the contrary,

his translation of this text may be taken to stand for a translation of her work as a whole,

since, as Sarraute states in the introduction to the text, "this first book contains in nuce all

the raw material that I have continued to develop in my later works" (Sarraute, 9).

Moreover, Saer's decision to translate this particular text by Sarraute makes sense for

another reason. As Sarraute notes, this work, along with Portrait d'un inconnu, "passed
21
The translation was published by Editorial Galema in Buenos Aires.
105
practically unnoticed in the post-war literary atmosphere, which was dominated by the

Behaviourist tendency and by a metaphysics of the 'absurd'" (Sarraute 10). Rather than

being unusual, his decision to translate this writer (Sarraute) and this particular text by

her, in fact fits with a broader pattern in his literary activity: his interest in neglected

writers and texts. Yet we might still wonder why Saer would choose to translate this

particular text by Sarraute rather than one of her later works, which develop her theory of

the tropism to a much fuller extent in the context of the novel. I have already given a few

answers here, such as his attraction to shorter texts at this moment in his career, as well as

a desire to translate a text where Sarraute's theory and her practice of it intersect most

explicitly. However, we can also venture another explanation: Saer's interest in origins

and artistic process. His entire corpus is shot through with markers of his fascination

with points of beginning, whether with regard to an individual, culture, city, nation,

language, or universe. For example the opening line of Nadie nada nunca, which is

threaded throughout the novel, is "no hay, al principio, nada" (Saer 11). Furthermore,

the following commentary on painting, a subject I will discuss in greater detail in the

following chapter, demonstrates his interest in artistic process: "En cuanto a la pintura

me gusta sobre todo ver la retrospectiva de un pintor para tratar de percibir, a traves de la

evolucion de las formas, el fundamento de su busqueda" (Saer 287). When we combine

his interest in origins with his attraction to the topic of artistic process, it is not surprising

that he chose to translate this work by Sarraute, since it represents not only an early text

in the chronological development of her writing, but also is the touchstone for her later

fiction, the foundation on which the entire edifice of Sarraute's oeuvre is constructed.

106
Just as Saer's earliest short stories are crucial for understanding his literary project, a

return to Sarraute's early text is essential to understand the central tenets of her work.

The alterations he makes to the original text in his Spanish rendering of it

substantiate his claim to have performed a non-literal translation. In general he is

respectful towards Sarraute's text, making every attempt to preserve the meaning of the

original, yet a detailed comparison of Saer's Spanish version with Sarraute's original

French text reveals how he intervenes in the work. The basic pattern in his translation is

that it introduces more changes as it proceeds, showing Saer becoming more daring as he

gets deeper into Sarraute's text. Of twenty four chapters altogether, the first seven do not

contain many alterations, but the number increases greatly in chapters X-XIII, a trend

which continues to the end.

Saer's translation tends to reduce the amount of repetition in Sarraute's original.

For example, in chapter II, he changes Sarraute's '"C'est servi, c'est servi'" (Sarraute 15)

to a single '"Esta servido'" (Sarraute 21). In chapter X, he renders "elles restaient la

assises, serrees autour de lews petites tables et parlaient" as "permanecian ahi, apretadas

junto a sus mesitas, y hablaban," thus eliminating the word "assises," which he could

have translated as "sentados," and translating "autour" as "junto a," whereas it should be

"alrededor," in order to use "alrededor" in the next line and not have it be a repeat. In

other words, where Sarraute uses one word and repeats it, Saer employs two in order to

avoid the linguistic redundancy. This is an interesting alteration, since Sarraute has

chosen to repeat "autour de," yet Saer suppresses it. What Sarraute includes as part of the

linguistic texture of these passages, Saer takes to be repetitions that need to be cleaned up

with revision.

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 Moreover, Saer frequently makes changes to Sarraute's use of punctuation.

Perhaps the most striking of these is his tendency to eliminate many of her commas, a

move that may seem surprising since he praises this quality in the translator's

introduction and makes extensive use of the device in his own fiction. However, his

suppression of some of her commas reads more as an attempt to put his personal stamp

on the text and does not undermine his admiration for her use of pauses, since even

though he eliminates many of them he preserves even more. While he adds three

commas to Sarraute's text, he removes or replaces ten of them, suggesting that Saer feels

Sarraute sometimes uses the device so much that it loses its efficacy. Several times he

makes this change in order to clarify an ambiguity in the original text, which is again

surprising since he frequently advocates for the literary advantages of this quality. Yet

the kind of ambiguity that he clarifies here is grammatical rather than the semantic type

that he makes a virtue of in his own fiction. He also eliminates or replaces five of

Sarraute's characteristic ellipses. She uses this device to build gaps into her texts,

creating a sense of fragmentation in the narrative. Perhaps even more than the comma,

the ellipse is one of Sarraute's chief techniques, and indeed, part of the originality and

innovation of her style. A typical page taken from one of Sarraute's novels will feature at

least several ellipses, which work to disorient the reader and compel him to engage with

the uncertainty and tension built into the fabric of the narrative. Saer's choice to

comment in the introduction on her use of commas, but not on her implementation of

ellipses, and his elimination of several of these in her text, suggests that he feels she

overuses this device slightly. He takes advantage of this perceived weakness in her text

in order to intervene and once again improve it as he sees fit. Furthermore, he

108
systematically eliminates or replaces her dashes, removing ten of them, according to my

calculations. This tendency is so consistent as to make one wonder if the dash is used in

the same way in Spanish as in French. Yet, as if to remind us that it is, in chapter XX

Saer does preserve Sarraute's original dash. However, in the other examples, he either

eliminates them altogether or replaces them with a colon, a "more formal.. .and not quite

as dramatic device" (Hacker 269) or semicolon. This is a surprising move, since in his

prose Saer does make use of the dash. Perhaps he feels, then, that Sarraute's use of this

device makes the text sound too much like an essay rather than a work of fiction or does

not suit Sarraute's prose in this particular text. Saer's removal of Sarraute's dashes

transforms the text by making it slightly more formal and also rendering the prose more

fluid and less fragmented.

Both writers are interested in capturing spoken language in their writing, yet

while Saer explores the everyday speech patterns of working class characters or

intellectuals living in rural areas or smaller, outlying towns, Sarraute's characters use

language typical of characters from the upper classes living in a metropolitan center.

Saer's widow, Laurence Gueguen, notes in an interview22 that Saer would take a

notebook with him whenever he traveled to Argentina and note down any new

expressions that he heard people using in daily parlance, which he would then work into

his own fiction. Thus the alterations he makes in the colloquial elements in Sarraute's

text is part of his broader interest in this question.

The transformations Saer makes to Sarraute's text demonstrate that he is an able

translator, but also that his approach to translation is of apiece with his other writing; he

goes to great lengths to preserve the sound and sense of the original text, yet at the same
22
Corradini, Luisa, La Nation, 12/08/07.
109
time he is willing to make changes when he believes they will improve the work. This

approach is consistent with his take on the nouveau roman writers generally, as revealed

in his essay from 1972 on their work: he is respectful of their ideas and literary

techniques, yet also does not hesitate to criticize their shortcomings. This pattern

exemplifies a broader trend in his relationship with their texts, which cannot be

characterized as simple influence, but rather creative and active selection, transformation

and integration of key elements and devices. Through this kind of dialogue with the

nouveau roman writers, he both inscribes himself within a broader avant-garde tradition

that he sees as including their work, yet also begins to carve out a niche for himself that

separates his workfromtheirs. We see also in the particularities of Saer's translation an

attention to the same types of details that characterize his prose. The care he gives to

apparently minor elements like punctuation and repetition reveals the sensibility of a

poet, who places importance not only on the sense of prose, but also on its sonic qualities.

A study of Saer's translation of Sarraute also provides an opportunity for

commentary on Saer's relationship to translation generally. As Casanova argues, not all

languages have equal literary prestige, and as a result writersfromlanguages that are less

endowed literarily who want to be recognized in the world republic of letters must work

to get their books translated into those languages that have greater literary cachet. Many

of these writers decide to move to the capital of the field of world literature, which

Casanova takes to be Paris, in order to facilitate this process. Casanova's prime example

of this phenomenon is the case of Joyce, whose move to Paris was part of his project of

renewing Irish literature by challenging the pressures on Irish writers to produce texts

that made national claims and fit pre-established paradigms. It is useful to consider the

110
case of Saer in light of these claims, even if he does not entirely exemplify Casanova's

argument. Any picture of why he moved to Paris originally must be speculative since his

resistance to providing biographical information has left little evidence of this type to

work from, yet it seems that his geographical shift was motivated more by a desire to be a

part of a vibrant literary and intellectual scene rather than an attempt to be read

internationally. At the same time his residence in France resulted in his work being

translated to French far more than any other language and a substantial body of critical

work that has been performed there on his oeuvre. Yet for a variety of reasons—the

difficulty of his texts, the paucity of them available in translation, the attention devoted to

Borges—at least up to the present moment, this has not resulted in Saer being consecrated

as a great writer on the scene of world literature.

If it were not for the attention he devotes to the nouveau roman in his essays and

the use of nouveau roman elements in his fiction, Saer's translations of these writers

would not have as much meaning. However in this broader context they make up part of

a pattern that demands explanation. The connections between Saer's "La Mayor" and his

translation of Sarraute's Tropisms, not only provide insight into a heretofore overlooked

influence on his work, but also clarify a dimension of his creative process. In his study of

her creative process, performed via translation of her work, Saer then teaches us

something about his own. Far from being an isolated or tangential part of his written

production, Saer's translation of Sarraute functions as a laboratory and generative site of

ideas and stylistic elements which would later make their way into his own writing. In

this sense, like his poetry, his translation of Sarraute is of a piece with the rest of his

fiction, contributing to a unified body of work. Serious consideration of this text expands

111
the scope of studies on Saer to take into account his translations and consider them as

literary texts worthy of attention in their own right, alongside the other components of his

total written production.

A careful consideration of Saer's "La mayor" reveals the extent to which it draws

on elements from Sarraute's Tropisms. Stylistically, there are clear parallels between the

two texts, particularly regarding the frequent use of the comma to extend sentences and

stretch out time. In an interview, Saer recalls being chastised by a grade school teacher

for his excessive use of commas, but in the work of Sarraute he found a model that

validated this practice. Saer has remarked upon this quality in his own writing and in his

translator's introduction to his rendering of Sarraute's text into Spanish he signals his

awareness of this characteristic: "La prosa tartajeante de la senora Sarraute, plagada de

comas que no seftalan el descanso calculado del discurso sino las vacilaciones propias de

la conciencia en su lucha por arrancarse de lo indeterminado, gana, con su imprecision

aparente, una precision mas honda, mas dialectica" (Saer 7). Saer views Sarraute's work

as a model for how a writer can employ commas to highlight the limitations of language

and the often problematic relationship between consciousness and language.

Emboldened by the work of Sarraute in French,23 Saer sets out in "La Mayor" to take his

use of commas to an extreme. One sentencefromthe opening of the text exemplifies this

technique:

"Mojaban, despacio, en la cocina, en el atardecer, en invierno, la galletita,

sopando, y subian, despuds, la mano, de un solo movimiento, a la boca, mordian y
dejaban, durante un momento, la pasta azucarada sobre la punta de la lengua, para
que subiese, desde ella, de su disolucion, como un relente, el recuerdo,
masticaban despacio y estaban de golpe ahora, fuera de si (Saer, 125).

Whose work, in turn, had been championed and thus itself given legitimacy by Sartre.
112
In this parody of Proust's madeleine passage, which mocks the nostalgia inherent in the

concept of involuntary memory, the almost obsessive use of the comma at times makes

for tedious reading, yet Saer uses it effectively to slow down the narrative time. This

technique makes of the reference of present to past moment in literary time one that is

marked by the same reverie as Proust's character recalling a moment of his childhood,

thus capturing the slow motion effect of the experience of memory. One example from

the opening of Sarraute's text establishes her use of the same device:

lis regardaient attentivement les piles de linge de l'Exposition de Blanc, imitant

habilement des montagnes de neige, ou bien une poup^e dont les dents et les
yeux, a intervalles reguliers, s'allumaient, s'eteignaient, s'allumaient,
s'eteignaient, s'allumaient, s'eteignaient, toujours a intervalles identiques,
s'allumaient de nouveau et de nouveau s'eteignaient (Sarraute 11-12)

Saer's text is more concerned with philosophical questions while Sarraute's work often

reads as a parody of the pretensions of the petite bourgeoisie, but they both use the

comma extensively to accomplish their respective projects. Both texts employ this

device to draw attention to the limitations of language; by using commas in this extreme

fashion they push language to its very limits in an attempt to capture inner experience, yet

they also use it to draw attention to the failures of communication between people and

thus the ultimate breakdown and insufficiencies of language as a whole. Yet the very

attempt to find new modes of literary expression is dynamic in its literary qualities and

potential. In this sense, "La Mayor" emerges out of Saer's dialogue with the nouveau

roman writers, particularly his translation of Sarraute's Tropisms, rather than springing

from nowhere, and marking an unexpected shift in his writing, as much of the criticism

suggests.

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 Moreover, "La Mayor" makes several points that can be connected with

Sarraute's essay "L'Ere du soupcon." The often cited opening lines of Saer's text are

particularly reminiscent of one of Sarraute's central arguments. Saer writes: "Otros,

ellos, antes, podian. Mojaban, despacio, en la cocina, en el atardecer, en invierno, la

galletita, sopando" (Saer 11). This passage recalls Sarraute's argument about the

differences between the literary possibilities available to writers working in the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and those available to writers during the middle

and late twentieth century. Although a later text in the same story collection reveals it is

Angel Leto, one of the recurring figures in his oeuvre and friend of Carlos Tomatis and

Pich6n Garay, in "La mayor" Saer's narrator is never named, as in Tropisms; as a result

the reader is left with an impression of an anonymous subject, compelling him to focus

exclusively on the ideas and form of the work rather than ascribing the commentaries to a

character with whom he might identify. This kind of experiment relates to the broader

interest on behalf of these two writers in the question of the role of character in the

contemporary novel. Both Saer and Sarraute rewrite the use of character in the

nineteenth century realist novel by using large casts of characters, drawing on the concept

of anonymity and critiquing the bildungsroman model.

In several places in his critical writings Saer alludes to Sarraute's L 'Ere du

soupgon and in "La Mayor" the term "suspicion" accurately describes the narrator's

attitude toward his ability to comprehend the nature of the world around him through the

use of his faculties of rationality. Indeed, while some have characterized his project in

terms of an aesthetic of negativity or uncertainty, the concepts of skepticism or suspicion

aptly describe Saer's work as well. As the narrator in "La Mayor" states, "ningun

114
mensaje, para mi, de ese hoyuelo, que se abre, con la risa, solitario, en el pomulo

derecho, ninguna certidumbre que sacar: nada" (Saer 18). Saer's opposition to didactic

prose emerges in this passage through the reference to the concept of a "message" as well

as his critique of the idea of certainty, which he associates with a more straightforward

and linear novelistic model. Sarraute employs the term suspicion to refer both to a new

age and to the attitude of the contemporary reader, who no longer trusts the writer who

employs conventional literary devices, but rather relates to the text he is reading in a

much more active and skeptical fashion. In "La Mayor" Saer takes the concept of

suspicion and applies it not only to the relationship between reader, writer and text, but

also to the relationship between subject and reality. The subject is often skeptical of

reality or fails to comprehend it, casting doubt on the reliability of human faculties,

particularly those of memory and sensory perceptions. In particular, perception falters in

both texts when it encounters inanimate objects. This topic recalls Robbe-Grillet's

objectivism, but Saer and Sarraute put their own stamp on the theme. For both writers

the encounter between subject and inanimate objects is connected to the question of the

relationship between self and other. Clearly an inanimate object is not the same as a

person, but the difficulty that the characters encounter in relating to the former serves as a

metaphor for similar problems with the latter. As for Saer's unnamed narrator, one of the

characters in Sarraute's text finds the world of objects to be inscrutable. In this sense the

thought experiment that he undertakes fails to yield the desired results. While he is

distrustful of them, the objects, here ascribed a kind of life of their own, are represented

as defying him since he perceives them that way. The narrator in Saer's text takes on the

115
same challenge of trying to penetrate into the world of objects and similarly comes up

empty:

Interrogar, por orden, uno por vez, o todo junto, todo, interrogar el escritorio, la
carpeta, interrogar el diario con las dos fotografias borrosas que no dicen, o no
parecen querer decir, por deck asi, nada, interrogar la cama, interrogar la silla, la
luz, la biblioteca, interrogar, una y otra vez (Saer 22)

The repetition of the verb "interrogar" in this passage is reminiscent of a Cartesian

thought experiment where a subject sets out to find a rational basis on which to found an

argument for existence, or in this case, the reliability of one's sensory perceptions.

Instead of finding proof, the characters in both texts instead fail in their respective

attempts; consequently, the foundation for a philosophical system cannot be established.

Yet, seizing upon the literary potential of this condition, Saer and Sarraute construct

projects out of the suspicion, doubt and skepticism that their protagonist's failed efforts

yield. This example demonstrates how Saer seizes upon Sarraute's concept of suspicion

and makes it into one of the cornerstones of his oeuvre.

In another sense, the two texts here under consideration by Saer and Sarraute

exemplify their search for language sufficiently complex and subtle to express inner

states, a project discussed earlier in this chapter as the relationship between language and

consciousness. In the course of this search, both writers often push language to the

breaking point, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that words sometimes fail to

meet the expectations we have for them, even causing confusion rather than resolving it.

As Saer puts the point in his translator's introduction to Sarraute's text in Spanish,

"nuestro corazon es mas rico que nuestras gramaticas" (Saer 7). At several points in the

text Saer's anonymous narrator attempts to capture the presentness of the present in

language; yet the more elaborate and intricate his attempts the more they fail to catch up

116
to time: "Estuve y estoy estando. Estuve, estuve estando estando, estoy estando, estoy

estando estando, y estoy ahora estuve estando, estando ahora en la terraza vacia, azul,

sobre la que brilla, redonda, fria, la luna" (Saer 16). In the fever of his ever increasingly

technical use of language, we can almost feel the frustration of the narrator's attempts to

slow down time with words and capture the experience of a present moment by resorting

to the most extreme grammatical forms available in Spanish. The speaker's commentary

juxtaposes several varying conjugations of the verb to be, contrasting a preterite form

with the repetition of the gerund "estando," which create the effect of a disintegration of

language and evoke grammar verb charts that are never used in actual speech rather than

effectively rendering consciousness in language. This type of passage provides an

example of an experiment with language in Saer's fiction that rivals Sarraute's audacious

use of devices like the comma, ellipse and repetition.

Another dimension of Sarraute's innovation involves her striking use of images of

liquidity and solidity, which critics of her work have noticed. For example, in Portrait

d'un inconnu, the narrator remarks:

quelque chose d'insaisissable sort d'eux, un mince fil tenu, collant, de petites
ventouses d'elicates comme celles qui se tendent, fremissantes, au bout des poils
qui tapissent certaines plantes carnivores, ou bien un sue poisseux comme la soie
que secrete la chenille; quelque chose d'ind^finissable, de mysterieux, qui
s'accroche au visage de 1'autre et le tire ou qui se r£pand sur lui comme un enduit
gluant sous lequel il se petrifie (Sarraute 64-5).

While one of the most distinctive aspects of Robbe-Grillet's writing is his use of images

of gaps and erasure, Sarraute creates an innovative atmosphere through descriptions of

threads, hairs, juices and coatings. She uses these images not only to describe rivalries

between characters and emotional or psychological power struggles, but also to create a

sense of tension that emergesfroma feeling of threat or menace that can be sensed, but

117
whose slippery, mysterious quality makes it elusive, impossible to nail down or identify.

In his use of metaphors that refer to shapes and abstract forms, Saer employs language

that is particularly reminiscent of Sarraute. For example, the narrator remarks,

En las esquinas del recuerdo, moviles, confusas, hay, hacia el centra, mas claro,
las manchas de la mafiana que se mueven, las manchas negras, verdes, amarillas,
azules, blancas, pardas, las manchas de la mafiana luminosa que flotan,
cambiando, no unicamente, como organismos vivos, de forma, sino tambieji, y
continuamente, de lugar (Saer 49).

Rather than shadows, Saer refers to the stains of the morning, creating a sense of damage.

While the specific use of the image of stains recalls Robbe-Grillet, as discussed in the

previous chapter, at the same time the fact that these stains change form and location,

making them sound like a mutating virus, recalls the slippery, elusive and menacing

quality of Sarraute's metaphors. Consciously working to break away from the use of

cliched imagery, they invent striking juxtapositions that create an atmosphere of

defamiliarization, not unlike the startling combinations used by Breton and the surrealists

to stir the viewer into seeing infreshways.

In his essay on Robbe-Grillet, Saer expresses his admiration for the consistency in

the French novelist's writing. The same idea could be applied to the work of Nathalie

Sarraute. Beginning with Tropisms, she created a body of texts that remained faithful to

an original concept, always experimenting, but never waveringfromthe initial idea. It

stands to reason that Saer admired Sarraute for this consistency and fidelity to an

originary principle, as he did Robbe-Grillet. The infrequency of Saer's references to

Sarraute, rather than showing that her fiction is inconsequential to him, reveals the

opposite; his relative silence about Sarraute makes his relationship with her work into one

of the most hidden—and therefore revealing—secrets about his writing.

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 The writer in society: Saer's Lo Imborrable (1993) and Sarraute's Entre la vie
et la mort (1968) and Les fruits d'or (1963)

The connections between Saer and Sarraute occur not only in places that Saer

references, like Sarraute's essays, or a point of direct contact, like a translation, but also

in the parallel between the ways they approach the theme of the writer in a contemporary

world that marginalizes and misunderstands him. The works of Robbe-Grillet are quite

self-reflective and employ language that recalls the act of writing, but they don't often

contain writer-characters or thematize the activity of writing as a profession in the same

way as in the work of Saer and Sarraute. As a result their fiction creates a context for

these more focused images which Robbe-Grillet's novels lack. Even when not entirely

centered on a writer figure, Saer's novels almost always contain a character who is a

writer.24 Saer's Lo Imborrable (1993) on the one hand and Sarraute's Entre la vie et la

mort (1968) and Lesfruitsd'or (1963) on the other all explore the process of writing and

the situation of the writer with respect to a world dominated by capitalism, mass media

and visual culture. Sarraute's novels center on this topic, while Saer's text weaves the

theme in among others, such as the military dictatorship in Argentina during 1976-83 and

the protagonist's depression. These three novels tie clearly into essays by Sarraute and

Saer and demonstrate the distinctions they each make between two kinds of writers.

Sarraute's novels exemplify her distinction in the essay "Ce que voient les oiseaux"

between formalist and realist writers, while Saer's novel illustrates the ideas from two of

his essays, "La literatura y los nuevos lenguajes" and "Literatura y crisis argentina," in

particular the contrast he draws in the latter between what he calls "literatura oficial"

24
Carlos Tomatis, Pich6n Garay, the poet Washington Noriega in Glosa, Marcelo Soldi in Lapesquisa.
119
produced by a "poeta oficial" as opposed to the "verdadera literatura" produced by a

"verdadero poeta." While they describe the argument in slightly different terms, together

in these essays and novels Sarraute and Saer distinguish between a more rigorous, avant-

garde type of writer who is alienatedfromhis reading public and a more popular writer

who they represent as being a sellout.

All three novels present the avant-garde writer as a figure who is misunderstood

and essentially at odds with the world around him. He seems to be just as alienated from

his family and literate people, who we might expect to be the ones with whom he is able

to connect with and communicate, as from the general public. All three novels represent

the experience of this more serious writer in terms of an incommensurable gulf between,

on the one hand, the writer's private world of introspection and his relationship with

language, and, on the other, the outer world that seeks to pigeonhole him into pre-

established literary categories and distorts his work. Moreover, the respective literary

aesthetics of Saer and Sarraute emerge through the specific critiques they make regarding

these misunderstandings; Saer parodies the insistence on following the criteria of

verisimilitude as an evaluative yardstick for a literary work, while Sarraute lampoons the

critic's need to apply biographical information as the sole source of interpretation. Both

of these approaches, Sarraute and Saer argue, result in failures to understand the creative

process.

The three novels connect the issue of the relationship between writer and society

with the broader question of whether communication between self and other is possible.

This theme recalls Sarraute's invocation in her essay "From Dostoievski to Kafka" of

Katherine Mansfield's line "this terrible desire to establish contact." Sarraute's unnamed

120
writer and Saer's Carlos Tomatis are both unable to connect with the people that surround

them, and as a result experience a sense of social alienation that is only tempered by their

private dialogues either in the process of creating their own works or by contemplating

other works of literature, through the process of literary interpretation.

Set in 1979-80, during the dark years of the military dictatorship in Argentina—

but approaching the theme with black humor rather than the grim atmosphere of fear and

violence employed by Nadie nada nunca—Lo Imborrable tells the story of the attempt by

Alfonso de Bizancio and Vilma Lupo, representatives of the publishing house Bizancio

Libros, to convince writer Carlos Tomatis to direct a literary magazine intended as a form

of resistance to the military government. The entire novel is told from Tomatis'

perspective, the only instance when this occurs in Saer's corpus; therefore it represents a

rare opportunity for insight into the inner workings of one of the most important

characters in Saer's oeuvre.

At the time when the novel is set, Tomatis has experienced eight years of writer's

block in addition to a prolonged period of reclusion indoors. Incidentally, the topic of

agoraphobia recurs in several of Saer's novels, particularly in the character of Gato in

Nadie Nada Nunca. Alfonso and Vilma admire Tomatis for an article he wrote attacking

the work of Walter Bueno, author of the best-selling novel of the decade, La brisa en el

trigo. Tomatis is critical of Bueno's novel for several reasons. First, it follows a realist

model that in many ways recalls the novels of Balzac or Flaubert that Sarraute criticizes

for representing an outdated model for twentieth century prose. Indeed, the plot of

Bueno's novel rewrites Madame Bovary: it is the story of a young woman teacher in a

provincial Argentine town who engages in an affair with a fellow teacher in order to

121
escape the monotony of her daily life and unfulfilling marriage to a salesman. When her

lover leaves the small town for Buenos Aires, she ends up committing suicide. Thus

Bueno is an Argentine version of the twentieth century French writers whom Sarraute

criticizes for continuing to write according to nineteenth century literary models.

Second, Tomatis attacks Bueno for his alliance with the military dictatorship, in

particular the figure of Negri, who recalls a similarly sadistic and violent torture expert

from Nadie nada nunca, El caballo Leyva. Bueno is careful not to make any comments

that would offend the values of the military rulers and owes much of his success and

popularity to a television show that he hosts called "Entre nosotros," where the sadistic

Negri appears for an interview. The link to television and the mass media in general

recalls the positions Saer expresses in his essay "La literatura y los nuevos lenguajes,"

namely that new forms of communication pose an enormous threat to literature which the

latter must protect itself against: "La cultura de masas, industria y estimulo del fantaseo,

es el enemigo mortal de la literatura" (Saer 210). In the same essay, Saer links the

writing of realist novels in the twentieth century with an authoritarian form of

government. In a phrase that creates a strong link to the terms Saer sets up in his essay

"Literatura y crisis argentina," Tomatis calls Walter an "escritor oficial," a

"propagandista de la dictadura" (Saer 24). For Tomatis the association between the two

is so strong that to attack Bueno's novel is also to attack the military government: "Si

escribi el brulote, no es porque Walter sea digno de que alguien se ocupe de el como

escritor, sino porque a traves de su persona, en tanto que figura de oportunista, era contra

el regimen que me despachaba" (Saer 34-5). Tomatis thus attacks the regime by

critiquing Bueno's novel. This kind of indirect attack is one of the few avenues open to

122
writers wanting to criticize the government, due to the censorship employed by the

military dictatorship.

Finally, Tomatis, and Saer through him, is critical of La brisa en el trigo, the

novel within Saer's novel, for being an exoticized representation of life in Argentina that

recalls the tradition of costumbrismo, a type of writing common in nineteenth century

Latin American literature that attempted to portray the daily customs and routines of

people in a particular region, usually a rural one, through the use of colorful descriptions.

This is clearly one of the kinds of writing that Saer, whose works are set in a fictional

version of the rural and relatively marginalized Santa Fe region of Argentina, wants to

get away from in his own prose. One of the main aspects of his project is to seek

alternatives to these quaint and exoticized representations of marginal, rural life.

Costumbrismo is thus one of the targets of his attack in this novel, as when he leverages

Sarraute's concept of the tropism.

Alfonso shares Carlos Tomatis' critique of Bueno's novel, but he opposes it for an

entirely different set of reasons than those of Tomatis. In fact, the basis on which

Alfonso criticizes Bueno makes him guilty of the same kinds of offenses as Bueno

himself, in the eyes of Tomatis. Thus whereas Alfonso views himself as being in the

same camp as Tomatis, their views on literature are fundamentally divergent. Rather

than using a different aesthetic criteria from the one that governs it, Adolfo uses the same

one: verisimilitude. He comments: "'Como va a ponerle a una novela La brisa en el trigo

si en el pueblo donde dice que pasa nunca hubo trigo. Una de dos, si en la novela hay

trigo, no es ese pueblo. Y si el pueblo es ese, no deberia haber trigo'" (Saer 22-3). On

the basis of his comments here, Adolfo is, however unwittingly, no less guilty of

123
employing outdated aesthetic criteria than Bueno himself. Rather than criticizing Bueno

for writing a realist novel in the first place, Alfonso simply finds fault in the book for

misrepresenting reality. By contrast, Saer, like Tomatis and the nouveau roman writers,

rejects the project of the realist novel in the twentieth century altogether, arguing instead

that a successful novel creates an independent world that must be evaluated on its own

terms rather than according to how faithfully it represents a given external reality.

Moreover, Alfonso's aesthetically naive critique of Bueno's novel goes hand in

hand with the literary project that he wants Tomatis to direct. Alfonso views this

magazine as part of a larger project of restoring "la autentica cultura nacional" (Saer

122), which he believes was already in decline before the dictatorship, but which this

regime contributed to destroying. Tomatis and Saer through him clearly endorse

Alfonso's opposition to the military dictatorship, but Alfonso's belief in an authentic and

pure national essence is represented as problematic. Saer shares Alfonso's critique of

censorship and the corrupting impact of capitalism on literature, but not his aesthetic

criteria or belief in a national literature that must be protected. Saer writes often about

Argentine literature, but never in essentialist terms; he frequently points to Argentine

writers whose work he considers typical of the national tradition because they defy

categorization. Just to take one example, in "Martin Fierro: problemas de genero," he

remarks that Hernandez's poem initiated "una de las tradiciones vivientes de la literatura

argentina: una serie de obras singulares, que no entra en ningun genero preciso" (Saer

60). Rather than subverting the values of the military regime, Alfonso's emphasis on a

national literary culture recalls a nationalistic spirit that reinforces them.

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 The contrast between the kinds of writers Alfonso promotes and those that

Tomatis favors further highlights the differences between them. The catalogue of

Bizancio libros that Tomatis leafs through emphasizes writers like W. Somerset

Maugham, Manuel Galvez, and Pearl Buck, who Tomatis describes in the following way:

"aparte de algunos clasicos servidos en tajadas, todos sus autores son de segundo orden"

(Saer 107). On the other hand, Tomatis states "Yo que habia pasado mi vida pensando en

Cervantes y en Faulkner, en Quevedo y en Vallejo y en Dostoievsky, me descubri a los

cuarenta anos, rumiando para conmigo mismo todo el santo dia historias de suegras"

(Saer 163). The contrast between these two categories of writers fits very much with the

literary categories Saer sets up in his essays. While the writers who Alfonso promotes are

successful in the marketplace, the ones who Tomatis emphasizes contribute to the

development of literature by inaugurating new forms of writing. We might question

whether these categories can really be maintained in as neat a way as Saer sets them up.

In any case, his use of this distinction shows how the spirit of Saer's theory of literature

has more in common with the Anglo-American modernist distinction between high and

low literature than with the postmodernist project of collapsing these boundaries. It also

demonstrates how he breaks with the McOndo group of Chile's Alberto Fuguet, who

combines highbrow literary techniques with references to works that have a broader

popular appeal.

Furthermore, by wanting to make this literary magazine into a force of political

resistance, Alfonso's project gestures towards Sartre's notion of commitment. In a

formulation that is particularly reminiscent of Sartre's language from Qu 'est-ce que la

25
The McOndo collection, which functions as a kind of manifesto of the ideas associated with this
movement, edited by Fuguet and Sergio G6mez, was published in 1996.
125
Htterature?, Alfonso remarks to Tomatis, "Usted.. .que es un artista verdadero y un

intelectual ponderado, tiene la obligacion moral de demoler ese producto comercial

pretendidamente representativo" (Saer 220). The reference to an "obligacion moral" to

write a certain way is particularly evocative of Sartre. However, Saer, through the

character of Tomatis, argues against this position. Literature must always be autonomous

and never in the service of some external political agenda, he asserts in several places. In

his typically cynical and sardonic way, Tomatis puts the point in the following terms:

"Que me cuelguen una y mil veces si es con una revista literaria cuatrimestral que yo le

arreglaria las cuentas a las viboras que reptan en el gobierno y si es empleando las

sutilezas de una publicacion monografica de nivel que, si pudiese, le daria su merecido al

general Negri" (Saer 124-5). This comment clearly fits with statements against

commitment that Saer makes in several of his essays. For Saer, as for Tomatis, literature

must befreefromthe obligation to serve a pre-determined political agenda.

At the end of the novel, Tomatis begins to recoverfromhis bout of agoraphobia

and writer's block. He attends the writer's conference organized by Vilma and Alfonso,

yet in one of the closing images remains isolatedfromthe world formed by the

relationship between Vilma and Alfonso. He can relate to them superficially, but as a

figure for the role of the true avant-garde writer, he refuses to be co-opted by their

literary project, and instead must remain independent. While it can be stultifying, this

position of alienation becomes a privileged pointfromwhich to produce a more

subversive form of literature.

Since they challenge societal conventions, the works of the nouveau roman

function for Saer as a form of resistance to the culture industry of capitalism. Like

126
Tomatis, they resist cooptation by these market forces, instead causing controversy,

debate and creating new forms of reading. Unlike Alfonso's interpretation of La brisa en

el trigo, the novels of the nouveau roman cannot be judged according to the criteria of

verisimilitude. By contrast, they demand to be read on their own terms, creating

independent and original literary worlds. This very act is political in nature, since it

functions as resistance to totalitarian forms of government. As Saer puts it, "esta

position, que puede parecer estetizante o individualista, es por el contrario

eminentemente politico''' (Saer 282).

Although published twentyfiveyears earlier than Lo Imborrable, the same year

that Saer moved to Paris, Sarraute's Entre la vie et la mort explores many of the same

themes as Saer's text. While writing and the creative process are topics that preoccupy

both writers throughout their work, these are the principal novels they produced where

these subjects become the focus, crystallizing around the centralfigureof afictionwriter.

As in Saer's novel, the writer's creations in Sarraute's text take on a life of their own

once in the public sphere, determining the writer's image, in spite of his volition. In a

key passage, Sarraute parodies the critic's need to interpret the writer's text in terms of

autobiographical elements, a type of project presented as no less naive than Saer's

depiction of the insistence on employing an evaluative criterion of verisimilitude in his

novel. One critic remarks to Sarraute's unnamed writer, "Ml y a dans son livre des choses

qui ne s'inventent pas. Duvecu. Je l'ai reconnu. 'Vous avez mis beaucoup de vous-

meme dans ce livre, 9a se sent, ne le niez pas...'" (Sarraute 154-5). Written at a time

when the role of the author was being hotly debated, Sarraute's text argues that the

attempt to read a work offictionin connection with an author's biography is misguided,

127
and seems to arise more out of the critic's personal enterprise than an effort to read the

text on its own terms. The novelist quickly responds to these charges in the following

terms: "'Bon, bon, puisque vous y tenez, on va le dire.. .C'est moi, bien sur, qui voulez-

vous que ce soit ? Comment aurais-je pu inventer ? imaginer ? II faut bien que ce soit

moi... (my ellipse) Comme 9a vous serez contents'" (Sarraute 156). For the unnamed

protagonist the effort to trace back elements from a work offictionto the author's life is

to miss the point of the work, since every text inevitably drawsfromthis pool of

resources; yet the creative process transforms these elements into a separate world that

must be evaluated on its own terms rather than reduced to an expression of the author's

life.

Furthermore, in a move that resembles her concept of the tropism, Sarraute makes

the idea of the fragment into an organizing principle for a work of fiction. If wholeness is

associated with totalization and systematicity, then both Saer and Sarraute employ the

notion of the fragmentary to construct an alternative literary enterprise. As the writer

puts it, "rejetant tout ce qui 1'entrave, saufjuste ici et la ces quelquesfragments...(my

italics) Prendre celui-ci pour commencer, ce fragment minuscule.. .tout ce qui doit rester

de l'image morcelee" (Sarraute 245). The notion offragmentationis a common trope in

postmodern writing; however, Sarraute and Saer use these images not only as metaphors

for the fallibility of perception, but also as a structuring principle for the narrative itself.

We never see the writer's novel reproduced within Sarraute's text, but we can infer that it

is written according to the same criteria that the author herself employs.

Just as Vilma and Alfonso project onto Carlos Tomatis characteristics that he

doesn't recognize in himself in Saer's novel, the people who come to visit the writer in

128
Sarraute's novel make him into a celebrity, creating a cult of personality that seems

entirely inappropriate and out of all proportion to his literary production. Their

determination to label him a genius is perhaps the most striking manifestation of this

tendency. This tendency in the general populace reveals the image of the writer to be a

product of the marketplace rather than a sincere engagement with his works. In this sense

Sarraute's commentary on society's co-optation of the writer and transformation of his

works into fetishized commodities echoes the arguments Saer makes in his novel. The

attention paid to intellectual life in Sarraute's representation of French society does not

reduce its culpability; fashions and trends in the intellectual world are no less pernicious

than outside of it.

While Entre la vie et la mort explores writing by centering on the figure of a

specific writer, Lesfruitsd'or investigates the literary reception of an invented novel to

which the title refers; the focus in the former is on the figure of the author, whereas in the

latter it is on the response to a novel. Although there are important differences between

the French and Argentine literary fields26 that the two authors reveal, Sarraute's tracking

of the changing status of this novel in the critical reception parallels Saer's representation

of the status of Walter Bueno's "La brisa en el trigo" in Lo Imborrable. Saer's novel

critiques the reliance on the criteria of verisimilitude as an evaluative tool for a literary

work and demonstrates how aesthetic judgments are not only intellectual, but always also

deeply personal. Sarraute's novel parodies the pretensions of the French literary

intelligentsia by showing how critics make extreme claims about literary value more on

the basis of fashion than sincere and faithful engagement with the text. Saer's presents an

Argentine literaryfieldwhere a novel becomes a bestseller due to readability and

26
This is a term used by Pascale Casanova, which she in turn takesfromthe work of Pierre Boardieu.
129
suspense, while Sarraute portrays a provincial French literary world that is almost

sickening in its pretentiousness and pomposity. In these two novels Sarraute and Saer

explore essential questions of critical reception, canon formation and the place of

literature in a broader cultural context, concerns that had always been an important part

of their writing but here become the focus. Both works show how a literary text takes on

a life of its own in the public sphere, which is related to the original work yet independent

from it, and entirely beyond the author's control.

In a novel that, stylistically, contains more complete sentences and relies less on

the conversationfragmentsthat mark her previousfiction,Lesfruitsd'or traces the rise

and fall in the critical response to a novel by the same name, echoing the distinction she

makes in her essay "Ce que voient les oiseaux" between formalist and realist writers.

While it provokes excitement when it first appears, the novel within the novel "Les fruits

d'or" ultimately exemplifies Sarraute's concept of a formalist work since it does not bear

re-reading. As readers of Sarraute's novel we never get direct access to the text that

gives its name to the title, but rather only encounter it through the comments of other

characters, a quality that creates problems for the reader. In essence he is made to be

complicit with the critics who parrot pre-established critical sound bites rather than

having an authentic encounter with the text. The critique of psychology or authorial

comment on the characters and the challenge the text poses to the reader echo Sarraute's

stated objectives in the essaysfromL 'Ere du soupcon.

Sarraute parodies the vagaries in the critical reception of "Lesfruitsd'or". While

whenfirstpublished the novel is called "le meilleur livre qu'on a ecrit depuis quinze ans"

(Sarraute 79), with time critics determine that "ceux qui, encore aujourd'hui, admirent

130
Les fruits d'or sont des sots" (Sarraute 190). One of Sarraute's points is that literary

critics are prone to making extreme judgments rather than evaluating a work in a more

nuanced and qualified way. They see the novel as either brilliant27 or a failure. By

contrast a woman character, who in typical Sarraute fashion is never named, formulates a

more balanced appraisal of the novel: "Bien sur, ce n'est pas parfait, on peut y trouver

des faiblesses, mais je crois, pour ma part, que c'est un livre de valeur" (Sarraute 171).

While the extreme evaluations are associated more with a given critic's projection of his

own anxieties onto the text, the even handed type of interpretation is linked to a more

honest and direct encounter with the work. In a key scene that marks the shift in the

public status of the novel, the perceptive female character dares to challenge the literary

hierarchy by puncturing holes in the idea that the novel is a masterpiece; she exposes one

of the famous critics as a fraud when he is unable to substantiate his claims with

examples from the novel, thereby revealing that he either hasn't read it carefully, or

worse still, hasn't read it at all. While at first she is criticized as "cette folle, cette tete

brulee" (Sarraute 91), the views of the audacious female character are borne out with

time when the dominant current of criticism, represented primarily by bullying male

figures, shifts. Against her insistence that her writing should not be considered in

connection with ecriture feminine these kinds of passages invite a reading of the text

along gendered lines, which many critics have done. Yet this approach should not

- « "Vous etes le plus grand, le phis fort... Votre dernier roman, quelle perfection...(my ellipse) Les Fruits
d'Or, vraiment, c'est un pur chef-d'oeuvre...Cela vivra dans trois cents ans...une sorte de miracle' »
(Sarraute, 80-82).
131
exclude the possibility of other types of readings, such as the one I am pursuing that

looks at the position the novel takes on questions of canonicity28 and reception.

Like Saer's novel, Sarraute's text demonstrates how political considerations are

inseparablefromliterary ones. Yet where politics emerge in Lo Imborrable in a more

explicit form, in Lesfruitsd'or they come out in the tense encounter between traditional

values on the one hand versus change on the other. In Sarraute's novel the conservative

literary critics behave like government officials who patrol the borders of their sacred

nation to prevent any foreign intrusions. In language that relies on a binary opposition

between order and chaos, the advocates of the excellence of the novel within the novel

are perceived by the representatives of the literary establishment as a threat. However,

Sarraute demonstrates that literary values arefluidand relative rather than fixed and

immutable. Sensitive to thefragilityof their viewpoints, members of the literary

establishment represent their ideas as if written in stone, in an effort to try to retain power

through bullying and intimidation.

Similarly, against the argument that the concept of modernity isfixed,Sarraute's

text asserts that what counts as classic or modern is determined by context. Like Saer,

Sarraute argues that the definition and meaning of modern changes over time. Moreover,

Lesfruitsd'or supports her assertion in "L'Ere du soupcon" that a text should reflect the

time in which it is written, not in the sense of representing an external reality according to

a criteria of verisimilitude, but rather that it should employ current techniques and forms

instead of continuing to repeat established onesfrompast literary epochs. While working

The construction of the canon itself can be considered in terms of gender, but I have chosen not to
highlight this dimension, following Saer's approach.
132
according to accepted conventions gives an author a sense of comfort and security,

literature advances only when writers take risks.

Although the nouveau roman has a reputation for being a cold and impersonal

approach to fiction, Sarraute's novel mocks the notion that literature is created

exclusively with the intellect. Similarly, Saer has asserted in several places in his essays

that the experience of reading involves the emotions just as much as the intellect. In

"Literatura y crisis Argentina," he writes "Seria un error grosero pretender que leemos

una obra de arte literaria con el intelecto y unicamente con el. La lectura pone en

movimiento todos nuestros componentes, sumergiendonos en un entresueno que es de

indole pulsional y en el que la razon interviene de cuando en cuando" (Saer 97-8). In a

key passagefromLesfruitsd'or, the narrative voice makes the following commentary:

Mais ils sont droles.. .ils sont touchants.. .accroches a la sensation « sincere »,
« spontanee ».. .ces mots ridicules qu'ils emploient.. .craignant tout ce qui est
construit, depouille, aride,« cerebral» (un des leurs mots preferes), ne se fiant
qu'a leur instinct, qui les fait aussitot, comme les chiots qui se couchent sur le dos
et geignent au seul bruit caressant d'une voix, reagir a ce qui est« vrai », a ce qui
est« beau »,« vivant», comme ils disent.. .Comme si tout en art n'etait pas
concerte a ftoid, Feffet de combinaisons savantes, de calculs, de conventions,
comme si le langage qui convient pour en parler avec le plus d'efficacite possible
et de precision ne devait pas fatalement etre un langage esoterique (Sarraute 111-
3)

The aesthetic values described here coincide with the ones Sarraute attacks throughout

her works—the sentimental novel that emphasizes dramatic emotions or the romanticist

emphasis on truth, beauty and spontaneity. However, while it is not always easy to detect

whether Sarraute's voice is ironic or sincere, the tone of this passage is parodic,

suggesting that to attack the aforementioned literary values with aggression and

arrogance is not the position she wants to take either. This literary paradigm has its

proper place and to wholly discredit it is to miss the point just as much as a wholehearted

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and uncritical endorsement of this approach. To assert that to value the role of emotions

in literature is to be a naive reader recalls precisely the kind of pretentiousness that

Sarrautefindsso repugnant.

Sarraute's novel also raises the question of imitation versus creation. The

character Jacques uses the fact that he can produce a parody of "Les fruits d'or" as proof

of the inferior nature of the original text. Another character counters with the example of

Joyce having taken the technique of the interior monologuefromanother writer. Does

that make Jacques like Joyce, since he created an imitation of Brehier that exceeds the

work of Brehier in literary excellence? While the characters discuss these ideas in a tone

that is somewhat tongue in cheek the fact that this scene ends up being the critical turning

point in the reception of Brehier's novel, where it goesfrombeing a success to being

essentially discredited, testifies to the importance of the questions being raised. In fact

the question of imitation or copying emerges both in several other Sarraute novels as well

as works by Robbe-Grillet, suggesting it is a common concern among writers associated

with the nouveau ronton. In Entre la vie et la mort the possibility is raised that the author

who is the central focus of the text has plagiarized one of his novels. In the case of Les

fruits d'or, in a statement that recalls Borges, Sarraute argues that at the present time in

literary history there are no themes that have not been written about: "Tout est dit. II

n'y'a rien de nouveau sous le soleil" (Sarraute 210). Consequently, imitation is a natural

part of the creative process and innovation emerges out of the structure of a text rather

than its content. To argue that the ability of one writer to create a parody of a longer text

that exceeds the original makes that second writer better than thefirstone is to miss this

point.

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 In a theme that harks back to Entre la vie et la mort, as well as forward to the

autobiography Enfance, the text also explores the question of the relationship between a

writer's life and his work. As in those novels, Sarraute here critiques the idea that

information about an author's life is a reliable instrument for study of her literary

production. Once his novel has lost credibility, several characters retroactively try to use

information about Brehier to substantiate the claim that his novel is second-rate. They

mention his interest in the occult and enthusiasm for poor quality literature. Yet another

character counters that Rimbaud, the great French symbolist poet, had similar taste:

'"Rimbaud etait exactement comme Brehier.. .Rimbaud aimait tout cela, vous le savez:

les peintures idiotes, les livres erotiques sans orthographe, les petits livres de I'enfance,

les refrains niais, la litterature demodee'" (Sarraute 205). By this logic, then, is

Rimbaud's work also to be considered second-rate? The question is, of course,

rhetorical, since Sarraute's point is that, while there are generally clear connections

between a writer's life and her work, to use one to evaluate the other is to take an

erroneous critical path.

Yet in a stunning reversal, after poking holes in the novel's reputation when it

was hailed as a masterpiece, after "Lesfruitsd'or" has lost its status, the rebellious

female character, who functions as a mouthpiece for Sarraute, comes out in favor of the

novel: "'Moi je ne suis pas du tout de votre avis. Moi Les Fruits d'Or, je trouve ca

admirable. J'aime enormement 9a'" (Sarraute 197). One might expect that Sarraute is

mocking this character for her apparently fickle judgments, but on the contrary she is

presented positively for believing in her own literary intuitions and having the courage to

stand up and challenge the dominant views of the critics. Nevertheless, while her praise

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for the novel does not rescue itfromSarraute's category of formalist texts, it

demonstrates that even if formalist novels are not great works of literature, they may still

have redeeming qualities. In this sense, the question of what will happen to "Les fruits

d'or" over time is presented as striking to the heart of the questions of reception and

canon formation, both of which were of the utmost concern to Saer as well.

As much as Saer drawsfromthe tradition of Anglo-American modernism, the

self-reflexive quality in hisfiction,where the act and process of writing itself becomes a

central preoccupation, marks a breakfromthese types of texts and instead creates a

stronger link between bis work and the nouveau roman. Within the French movement, if

Saer's use of images of writing and erasure recall Robbe-Grillet, his exploration of the

relationship between writer and society creates a link with the novels of Nathalie

Sarraute. Saer's Lo Imborrable and Sarraute's Entre la vie et la mort and Lesfruitsd'or

highlight the alienation of the writer in a society increasingly driven by capitalism, the

mass media and visual culture. None of these novels representsfictionas a site for

transcendence; moreover, the relationship between the writers depicted and the societies

where they live is marked by conflict and misunderstanding rather than harmony. As a

result thefigureof the writer sometimes tends to slip into the background. Both Saer and

Sarraute are keenly aware of how the meaning of a text depends on how it is read and

received. Yet all three novels represent the alienation of the protagonists as a sign of the

continued validity of the margin as a space for critique; the marketplace is unable to co-

opt the niche the writer has carved out for himself, leaving open the possibility for the

continued creation of avant-garde gestures that emergefromthe periphery.

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 Conclusion

In a sense Sarraute is a doubly marginalizedfigurewith respect to the Argentine

literary traditionfromwhich Saer was reading her. As a writer associated with the

nouveau roman, she practices a kind of writing that was rejected by the mainstream of

Argentine letters. Yet as a woman whose project was distinctfromthe rest of the

nouveaux romanciers and who was ambivalent at best about being lumped in with them,

she is even further pushed to the periphery. In short, she is a marginalfigureof a

marginalized group. While he doesn't discuss her writing in these terms, Saer's interest

in Sarraute, which emerges through his translation of her work and references to her in

his critical essays, is thus consistent with his project of championing what he perceives as

understudied and underappreciated writers and texts.

Both his translation of her text and the parallels I have highlighted here between

the work of Saer and Sarraute revolve around the theme of writing, whether it be in terms

of the act itself or the meaning of being a writer within a broader context. Both authors

have a highly developed awareness and sensitivity to the importance of interpretation in

the construction of textual meaning, the vagaries of critical reception and the complex

dynamics of canon formation, all of which emerge in their critical writings and fiction

alike. Yet Saer admires Sarraute because, rather than imitating well-worn or established

literary models, she takes into account the innovations of the Anglo-American modernist

writers, but then goes beyond them, combining their literary techniques with her own in

order to create an original vision. This effort is not always an unqualified success, yet the

inventiveness andrigorof the project itself make it a contribution to literature and

pushing forward literary boundaries. Like Saer, Sarraute deliberately thwarts the reader's

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expectations, obliging him to engage with the text on its own terms andfindnew ways of

reading.

Saer draws upon Sarraute's notion of the tropism as a model and metaphor of

fragmentation which critiques the totalizing masternarratives that are the basis of

nineteenth century realistfiction,and provides an alternative and a corrective to these

types of novels. In their novels that explore the place of the writer in contemporary

society, the two authors expose theories of critical interpretation that are as outdated as

the nineteenth century realist techniques. In other words they offer critiques and present

possible alternatives at both the levels offictionand exegesis. Saer denounces the use of

the criteria of verisimilitude while Sarraute attacks the use of an author's life in order to

interpret his work. Both of these approaches, they argue, are anachronistic or reductive

techniques that are not appropriate tools for excavating meaning in twentieth century

literature.

If Robbe-Grillet provides a model and a precedent for the use in a work of fiction

for scenes of physical acts of violence, then Sarraute creates a paradigm for the creation

of tension through descriptions of linguistic violence which metaphorically represent

emotional or psychological rather than physical conflict. In the search for a new

narrative form that does not depend as much on plot development, this technique allows

Saer and Sarraute to erect a narrative on the basis of an emotion, a moment or a distinct,

often eerie and menacing atmosphere. The type of narrative tension that is created

through this approach is related both to Sarraute's notion of the tropism, which creates an

experience of defamiliarization, and to her concept of suspicion, which refers to a conflict

between reader and writer. In this sense Sarraute's essays and herfictionprovide a

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model for the creation of tension in a literary text without reference to narrative or plot,

which Saer employs to great effect in his own work.

From the literary aesthetic she outlines in her essays to his translation of her

foundational text into Spanish and importation of devicesfromit into his own fiction and

on to the parallels in their representations of the figure of the writer in a contemporary

world dominated by capitalism, mass media and visual culture, the work of Nathalie

Sarraute is a touchstone and source of ideas for Saer. Sarraute's impact thus extends

beyond the boundaries of a small French literary circle to which scholarship on her work

is usually limited, and, more importantly for this study, shows how Saer reaches past the

influences typically emphasized by scholarship done on his work up to the present—

Borges, Macedonio Fernandez, Faulkner—to integrate elementsfromthis highly

innovative nouvelle romanciere into the intricate tapestry of his own fiction.

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 Chapter Four: Diverging from the Nouveau Roman: Saer and Michel Butor

Two Contrasting Approaches to the Novel

If we situate the nouveau roman writers on a continuum according to difficulty

Robbe-Grillet would be at one end while the work of Michel Butor could be situated at

the opposite extreme. Of course to be a slightly more accessible nouveau roman writer is

still to be challenging and innovative, and this is certainly the case with Butor.

Nevertheless, while his novels L 'Emploi du temps (1956) and La Modification (1957),

critically acclaimed and influential texts associated with the nouveau roman, are complex

and pose problems for the reader, they also employ a more straightforward and

transparent language than most of the otherfiguresassociated with the group. Perhaps

this quality is what leads Michel Leiris to use the term "realism" to describe Butor's

prose, in an article published together with La Modification.1 However, in "Le roman

comme recherche (1955)," Butor articulates two ideas that are central to both Saer and

the project of the nouveaux romanciers, the need tofindnew narrative forms and the

importance of confronting the reader rather than perpetuating his complacency by using

familiar techniques. Setting up a distinction between market success and formal

experimentation, Butor insists on the value of innovation and is especially critical of

novelists who refuse to reflect upon the nature of their practice or attempt to disguise this

aspect of it. Thus although his writing may be more accessible than that of Robbe-Grillet

or Sarraute, Butor shares their central concerns, which justifies considering him as part of

the nouveau roman.

1
Leiris, Michel, "Le r^alisme mythologique de Michel Butor," Critique, # 129, Paris, 1958.
2
Butor, Michel, Repertoire: Etudes et conferences 1948-1959, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1960.
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 While Saer may not refer to his work asfrequentlyor in as specific terms as he

does with that of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, he mentions Michel Butor several times

both in his early essay on the nottveau roman and his later one devoted to the work of

Robbe-Grillet. In an interview with Guillermo Saavedra,3 he refers to the first volume of

Butor's essay collection Repertoire as "un libro critico clave del nouveau roman"

(Saavedra 177). In his essay on Robbe-Grillet, Saer once again refers to Butor's essays,

situating them alongside those of Barthes and Sartre in the twentieth century French

intellectual landscape: "Tal vez desde los ensayos criticos de Roland Barthes, de los

Repertorios I y II de Michel Butor, o de las primeras 'Situaciones' de Sartre, las

reflexiones criticas de un escritorfrancesno se habian sumergido con tanta agudeza y

energia en la problematica artistica de su epoca" (Saer 123). However, in spite of Saer's

comments praising Butor's essays and the fact that he shares certain positions with Butor,

their theories of the novel are opposed in fundamental ways. Yet the contrasts between

their respective theories illuminate and clarify each writer's approach to literature. In this

section, I will take up these differences between Butor and Saer according to three major

topics: first, their views of two major figures from western literature, Joyce and Balzac;

second, their theories of the novel; and third, their fiction. Rather than taking into

account the entirety of Butor's prolific literary output, I will concentrate on a more

narrow selection of his essays and his two most influential novels, La modification and

L 'emploi du temps.

Before entering into a discussion of the ways their projects differ, I would first

like to consider some of the parallels between the work of Saer and Butor. In the essays

from the Repertoire collection and in his fiction, Butor shows that he is an imaginative
3
"Juan Jose" Saer: El arte de narrar la incertidumbre,"fromLa curiosidad impertinente (1993).
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writer who is constantly searching for ways to reinvent the novel and place it into

dialogue with other art forms. If what unites Saer with Sarraute is a poetic sensibility,

Butor's penchant for philosophical reflection—like Saer, he was trained in this tradition,

unlike Robbe-Grillet's training in agronomy or Sarraute's background in law—is part of

what he shares with Saer. A prolific critic who is willing to raise the most fundamental

of questions, as an essayist Butor more closely resembles Saer than any of the other

practitioners of the nouveau roman, a parallel that makes sense given Saer's professed

admiration for Butor's essays. Whereas in their articles, Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute

respond to criticisms or misunderstandings of their fiction and make provocative claims

that elaborate a specific literary aesthetic, Butor's essays are often energetic reflections

on writers and texts that interest him. While Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute are often

preoccupied with explanations of their enigmatic novels, Butor's less controversial

fiction liberates him to take on a greater variety of topics in his essays. The recurring

themes in the essays include the relationship between author, reader and text; the place of

the novel with respect to mass culture; and the question of space in the novel.

The product of a restless spirit who was never content to work within a single

genre and constantly sought to expand their boundaries, Butor's non-fiction provides a

model for Saer of how to approach the central aesthetic questions of one's time, culture

and literature through the essay form. Following in Butor's footsteps, Saer explores

major figures from the broader pantheon of world literature and writers from his own

national literary tradition; as Butor takes up French writers like Balzac, Saer studies

Argentinean ones, like Borges, Roberto Arlt, Macedonio Fernandez, D. F. Sarmiento. At

the same time, both Butor and Saer consciously seek to cross these national boundaries

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by writing on figures from outside their own traditions. Saer's essay production as a

whole parallels that of Butor, since both write on a great range of topics—from literature,

to painting, to culture, to music—that together create a deliberately eclectic body of

work. For the diversity of subjects he considers and the rigor of his observations on

them, Saer considers Butor's essays to reflect the central artistic questions of his time.

Saer's phrasing of this point implies a contrast between a writer like Butor, whose

concerns he sees as in keeping with the Zeitgeist, and a tradition of other writers who are

the target of the criticism of Saer and the nouveau roman because they produce novels

that remain trapped in the aesthetic concerns of a previous age, exerting a retrograde

force on the development of the genre. Thus while Saer situates Butor with the nouveau

roman writers, he also breaks with them.

Evaluating Major Figures of Western Literature: Joyce and Balzac

One of Saer's main claims regarding the nouveau roman generally is that it tries

to take into account the innovations of modernism by putting into practice and advancing

the inquiries of these writers, effectively taking up their legacy; for Saer, the essays of

Butor, with their commentaries on figures like Joyce and Balzac, assess and establish the

link between the nouveau roman writers and their predecessors more clearly than almost

any other writer of his time. When discussing major literary figures from the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries, Saerfrequentlydraws on the work of Butor, using it as a

springboard for his own reflections.

In his discussion of Joyce, Saer follows Butor in emphasizing the importance of

the thought of Italian philosopher Jean Baptiste Vico, particularly with regard to the

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question of time. In one of his essays on the work of the Irish master, "Petite croisiere

preliminaire a une reconnaissance de l'archipel Joyce (1948),"4 Butor writes "Des le

premier paragraphs de la premiere page, le mot vicus annonce un nom qui va revetir une

importance particuliere tout le long du livre, celui du philosophe italien Jean-Baptiste

Vico" (Butor 213). Butor goes on to devote several paragraphs to a discussion of Vico,

making it a central point of the essay. While commenting on the work of Joyce in "Notas

sobre el Nouveau Roman," Saer writes "Toda la musica de Finnegan 's Wake es

significante, aun en el nivel mas general del texto, el de cierta concepci6n de la historia

que Joyce toma de Vico" (Saer 174). The notion that Vico is important for Joyce is by

now familiar,5 but the fact that Saer admits openly to the significance of Butor's essays

and that he links Joyce and Vico precisely in his essay on the nouveau roman, suggests

that he picks the connection up from his French contemporary.

Furthermore, at least twice in the course of his critical essays, in two separate

articles, Saer links Joyce and the nouveau roman. Speaking of the link between

consciousness and the structure of the novel in "Narrathon"6 (1973), he remarks "De

Proust y Joyce al Nouveau Roman, pasando por Kafka, Faulkner, Svevo, Dos Passos,

Musil, Mann, Borges, Pavese, no es otra, si se mira bien, la intencion o, mas

pragmaticamente, el resultado" (Saer 142). In "La selva espesa de lo real," he states

"Para los grandes narradores de este siglo, desde Joyce al Nouveau Roman, el objetivo

principal es romper las barreras impuestas por la conception perimida de una historicidad

sin fallas" (Saer 259). The frequent occurrence of this link at a point in each sentence

4
Butor, Repertoire.
5
See Vico and Joyce, edited by Donald Phillip Verene, State University of New York Press, 1987.

Saer, El concepto de fiction.

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that makes it a side or introductory thought rather than the main idea of the phrase

suggests that it almost wells upfromSaer's subconscious. The link between Joyce and

the nouveau roman as a movement makes sense, since both are responsible for radical

innovations in the novel during the twentieth century, but the fact that of the nouveaux

romanciers Butor focused especially on Joyce together with the other examples that link

Saer to Butor on Joyce suggests that Saer's use of this connection between Joyce and the

nouveau roman stems at least in partfromhis reading of Butor. The work of Butor

mediates Saer's encounter with a major figure from the canon of modern western

literature.

Joyce is an important model for the fiction of both writers; their use of his

representation of Dublin in Ulysses (1922) as a model for how to map out a specific space

of a city is especially evident in Saer's portrait of Santa Fe in Glosa (1988) and Butor's

rendering of Bleston in L 'emploi du temps. Both novels render the city or a small section

of it, in the case of Glosa, in highly detailed terms which capture the particularities of the

space without idealizing it or resorting to descriptions that recall the tradition of

costumbrismo. Yet, while Saer's project follows Joyce in its use of the position of exile

as a privileged perspective and the emphasis on literature as art rather than political

instrument, the connections between thefictionof Joyce and Butor are difficult to

identify. Even in a novel like L 'emploi du temps, which provides a map of a single town

in a way that could be traced back to Ulysses, Butor's transparent use of language creates

a strong sense of a project that divergesfromthat of the great Irish novelist. While Saer's

linguistic playfulness and fascination with drawing attention to the limitations of

representation, perception and memory create an identifiable link with Joyce, Butor's

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prioritization of language as primarily a vehicle to propel forward the narrative and

transmit meaning evokes an alternative type of project.

When Butor reaches back from the twentieth century to the nineteenth to study

Balzac the differences he has with Saer come into even clearer focus. Butor devotes an

essay to defending Balzac and refers to him positively in several other pieces (like

"L'espace du roman"), while Saer follows the other nouveau roman writers in

approaching Balzac as a bete noire. Butor's essay "Balzac et la realite" (1959) is a point

of reference that Saer employs in order to form some of his ideas regarding the great

French nineteenth century novelist. Butor's assessment provides a model for a more

subtle, qualified approach to Balzac and the realist tradition, and Saer's comments on

Balzac in "Notas sobre el Nouveau Roman" build upon Butor's analysis. For example,

Saer takes two ideas directly from Butor for his essay: the claim that one of Balzac's

chief innovations was the technique of the recurrence of characters from one novel to

another—a method later employed also by Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, and Saer

himself—and the notion that Balzac employed this device to distinguish his work from

that of Walter Scott, the legendary Scottish practitioner of the historical novel, whose

fiction was particularly influential during Balzac's lifetime. In an instance of Saer openly

attributing to Butor an idea he borrows from him, Saer states "La revolucion balzaciana

estriba, segun Butor, y yo estoy de acuerdo, en la invencion de un procedimiento: la

reaparicion de personajes" (Saer 175). In a revealing statement, Saer boldly endorses an

argument from Butor that is practically a statement of fact rather than a claim. It would

be nearly impossible for Saer to agree with Butor on any of his more substantive

arguments, since the more they move into these areas the more their positions diverge.

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 While the thrust of Butor's essay is a defense of and call for a more thoughtful

consideration of Balzac, Saer instead touches on the French realist writer's work only in

order to urge a break among twentieth century practitioners of the novel from the

tradition it establishes, calling it "una falsa tradici6n y letra muerta" (Saer 177). In

contrast to Butor's effort to demonstrate the continuity between Balzac's fiction and

twentieth century experimentation with the novel, Saer follows the nouveau roman

writers in seeing Balzac as emblematic of an outdated type of writing with which

novelists in the twentieth century should break. He qualifies and clarifies this position at

the close of the essay by saying that the nouveau roman writers by no means reject

Balzac and his other predecessors, but rather seek to contextualize them appropriately

and call for contemporary novelists to move beyond them; but this clarification is

nowhere near the position that Butor takes defending Balzac and explaining his

overlooked complexities.

This difference shows how, although Saer and Butor call for novelists to discover

new forms rather than repeating old ones, they have divergent ideas of what this project

entails. For Butor new forms can mean the preservation and continued use of realism,

while for Saer it must always involve work with the structure of a novel and the

exploration of language. Thus, while his reliance upon Butor's assessment demonstrates

that Saer's engagement with Balzac is filtered by the analysis of his contemporary French

practitioner of the nouveau roman% his argument has a divergent emphasis. In "L'espace

du roman," in an innovative discussion of the role of space in the genre of the novel,

Butor describes the way a writer of fiction creates an image of the space the characters

inhabit through the description of details, in a passage that sounds like a "show not tell"

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lesson in a creative writing course. However, in a moment that reveals his vision of what

this concept actually involves, his examples are generous citationsfromthe work of

Balzac describing the location of furniture in a room and the features of characters. In

other words, he draws on perhaps the most paradigmatic realist writer of the nineteenth

century in order to illustrate his idea of how a novelist can treat the question of space. In

a part of the essay where he might have discussed the more experimental use of urban

space by a twentieth century writer like Joyce or even his fellow nouveaux romancier

Robbe-Grillet, Butor instead turns to Balzac. While this may be a conscious move

designed as part of his project to reconsider Balzac, it illustrates the value he places on an

approach to space rooted in a realist aesthetic.

Saer's claim that the meaning of the concept of modernity changes according to

historical context also draws on the work of Butor. In his essay on the work of Balzac,

Butor argues that it would be ridiculous to reject Balzac's project in favor of twentieth

century approaches to narrative or to delineate a clear break between nineteenth and

twentieth century writing. Instead, he highlights the continuity between the two, and also

points to how innovative Balzac was during his lifetime:

Commencons par faire remarquer a quel point Balzac est volontairement et

systematiquement novateur, quelle conscience il a de son originalite comme
romancier, a quel point il considere sa technique et son invention technique
comme ouvertes, comme susceptibles de bouleversements surprenants, bien loin
de se figer dans cet academisme qu'on lui attribue par suite d'un malentendu
complet, et dans lequel s'enlisent ses faux disciples (Butor, 81).

In contrast to the typical tendency in the criticism to treat Balzac as outdated from a

twentieth century perspective, Butor stresses how his fiction was consciously

revolutionary at the time when he wrote. Butor insists upon Balzac's awareness of his

own innovation against a picture of him as having accidentally stumbled into these

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contributions. Finally, he highlights the openness of Balzac's oeuvre, in contrast to the

commonly held idea of Balzac as exemplifying a neatly packaged type of novel

culminating in a clear resolution. Saer picks up on these ideas when he argues in his

early essay on the nouveau roman that the notion of modernity and what counts as

subversive is fluid rather than fixed:

El primer supuesto sobre el que se basa la teoria del Nouveau Roman es el de

modernidad. Este concepto es puramente subjetivo: la modernidad no se vive
mas que subjetivamente. Balzac se designaba a si mismo moderno, pero esa
designation ya no es valida para nosotros. No era valida mas que como
autoafirmacion de Balzac en relation con cierto pasado, pongamos por ejemplo el
de la novela historica de Walter Scott, la que a su vez se autodesignaba, en su
momento, como moderna, y asi sucesivamente...Los escritos del afio proximo
seran, obviamente, el afio proximo, mas modernos que los de este afio. La
modernidad es movil, porque es subjetiva: en arte, las cosas en si no son ni
modernas ni antiguas (Saer 170).

While Saer does not attribute these ideas to Butor, several of them are especially

reminiscent of his French predecessor's claims regarding Balzac: the notion that Balzac

was modern at the time he wrote, even if he seems anachronistic from a twentieth century

perspective, the extension of this idea to a broader emphasis on artistic subjectivity, and

the contrast he sets up between Balzac and Walter Scott. Saer's choice to juxtapose

Balzac with Scott and his insistence on highlighting the fact that Balzac considered his

own work to be innovative clearly echoes Butor's emphasis on the same point in his

essay. Yet the contrast between what these two writers do with these passages is

revealing. While Butor enthusiastically emphasizes Balzac's consideration of his own

work as innovative, as if we should also endorse that claim, Saer instead is careful to

emphasize this was Balzac's estimation of his own work ("si mismo", "autoafirmacion",

"autodesignaba") and to distinguish between how Balzac saw his own work and how we

should see it, namely as a past tradition that contemporary writers should move beyond.

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Saer draws on Butor's reading of Balzac and incorporates it into his study of the nouveau

roman, which he in turn then generalizes into a broader theory of art that emphasizes

temporal relativity. While the thrust of Butor's article is a call for more thoughtful study

of Balzac's oeuvre, Saer leverages several of Butor's points regarding Balzac, but puts

them in the service of an argument about the development of the novel as a genre. Again,

Butor takes this stance in opposition to the nouveaux romanciers who, like Saer, call for a

break from the tradition they see Balzac as representing. However, in addition to being a

provocative argument made for the purpose of fostering dialogue, Butor's defense of

Balzac reveals his broader views on literature and is consistent with the type of fiction

that his novels exemplify.

The Theory of the Novel

Saer and Butor both emphasize the fact that a novel cannot be measured against

any criteria except what is internal to it and call for the development of the novel form.

Yet, aside from these basic points of contact, their respective theories of the novel are

quite divergent, as Butor's "L'espace du roman" and "Le roman comme recherche," and

Saer's "La novela" reveal. While Butor emphasizes the way the novel can shape new

ways of perceiving the world and redefine our notions of space, Saer insists that the novel

not be a medium that is required to transmit a message, tell a story, or even have any

other mission aside from an aesthetic one: "Por otro lado, un pufiadito de hombres

aislados, menos sabios, sin nada especial que comunicar ni mision historica alguna que

cumplir explora la lengua, con incertidumbre yrigor,para elaborar en ella una

construction cuyo sentido es su forma misma" (Saer 124). While Saer emphasizes the

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novel as a privileged site for the exploration of language, Butor's more practical approach

highlights its potential to reflect experience and renew perception. Both are harshly

critical of novelists who don't explore new forms or reflect upon the nature of their

medium and art. However, while Butor argues that a novel can be used to illustrate a

certain theory, for Saer it must always stand on its own terms rather than be subservient

to any external criterion. The very language they use in these critical essays to argue for

these divergent points in itself exemplifies these differences, since Butor's linear verbiage

contrasts with Saer's dense, enigmatic prose.

While Saer wants to make a clean break with the term "realism," Butor retains

and redefines it. Butor's reevaluation of Balzac goes hand in hand with his call for a

more thoughtful consideration of realism. By contrast, once his writing has become more
o

mature and he has established a coherent aesthetic philosophy, Saer consistently

emphasizes how he knows of no satisfactory definition of realism and that he sees the

meaning of the term as relative.9 On the other hand, in "le roman comme recherche,"

Butor seeks to respond to what he perceives as misconceptions about realism and to

recuperate the term by redefining it: "1'invention formelle dans le roman, bien loin de

s'opposer au realisme comme l'imagine trop souvent une critique a courte vue, est la

condition sine qua non d'un realisme plus pouss£" (Butor 9). Even if Butor's conception

of realism is a redefined version, the very fact that he calls for a retention of the term

while Saer wants to leave it behind is illustrative of their contrasting approaches. With

7
Several critics of Butor have referred to this quality as a "didactic" element in his writing.
8
Startingfromthe publication of Cicatrices in 1969 and reflected as early as his essays "El guardian de mi
hermano," "£/ largo adios" and "La leccidn del maestro" in 1965.
9
See the second section of "Notas sobre el nouveau roman" for both of these ideas.
151
the phrase "un realisme plus pousse" Butor complicates the simple binary opposition that

is often set up between formal invention and realism. Like Sarraute, he defends the call

for the discovery of new forms against those who aim to discredit it by opposing it to

what they call realism. He shows how rather than being opposed to realism, a literature

that is founded on the development of new forms is actually a deeper type of realism

since it strives to replicate how the subject experiences reality in its structure. This

approach parallels Sarraute's distinction in "Ce qui voient les oiseaux," between

formalists and realists, where she uses these terms in ways that invert their typical usage;

however Sarraute's criticism of Balzac and use of experimental prose inscribes her in a

tradition that is more consistent with Saer than Butor. While he shares the emphasis on

new forms as a source of rigor, Saer discusses the value of the discovery of new literary

forms as an end in itself, one that need not have productive ramifications. On the

contrary, the revelations Saer's characters experience more often than not reveal a world

that is chaotic, threatening, enigmatic and violent rather than ordered, coherent and

intelligible. For example, Doctor Real's moment of insight in Las nubes leads to a

revelation that a moment of terror is not far away: "me dije que, desterrado de mi mundo

familiar, y en medio de ese silencio desmesurado, el unico modo de evitar el terror

consistia en desaparecer yo mismo y que, si me encontraba lo suficiente, mi propio ser se

borraria arrastrando consigo a la inexistencia ese mundo en el que empezaba a entreverse

lapesadilla"(Saerl61).

Saer's articulation of the way selfhood depends on a coherent sense of place, the

absence of which can result in a disturbing disintegration of identity, presents a marked

contrast with Butor's narratives. In a passage at the end of Part IV, in one of his darkest

152
moments, the narrator melodramatically remarks: "Void le lamentable aboutissement de

ma tentative de lutte ; il ne me reste plus, digne objet de ris£e, qu'a reconnaitre mon

indeniable defaite irremediable, sans le moindre espoir de revanche, comme si j'etait deja

mort, ton incontestable puissance, terrible ville-larve que je hais, la disproportion de nos

forces" (Butor 252). While Revel admits defeat in this description of a metaphorical

struggle between himself and Bleston, his attribution of his bleak outlook to the town

suggests that he will be able to reconstitute his identity when he leaves. Revel closes his

narrative by stating that he left a certain piece of information unmentioned, but his

departure from the town at the conclusion of the novel creates a sense of closure. Revel's

moment of understanding is restricted to the town of Bleston, while Doctor Real's

epiphany in Saer's novel amounts to an insight into the fundamentally chaotic structure

of the universe and the self. Both novels connect identity with place; however, Las nubes

subverts the notion of the stability of identity, whereas L 'emploi du temps leaves open the

possibility that the protagonist can rediscover himself by leaving Bleston and returning to

France. The critique of authenticity in Saer's fiction contrasts strongly with the constant

search for it in Butor's two most influential novels.

Saer and Butor also differ regarding the relationship between fiction and theory.

Saer consistently distinguishes between theory and fiction, arguing that fiction must

always be evaluated on its own terms and that effective fiction can be built on the basis of

erroneous theories: "Debemos juzgar a los narradores por sus narraciones, no por sus

teorias. Y se pueden escribir buenas narraciones aun sustentando teorias erroneas" (Saer

178). Butor envisions a much closer link between theory and fiction. For example, in

"Le roman comme recherche," he states "D'autre part si je veux expliquer une theorie

153
quelconque, psychologique, sociologique, morale ou autre, il m'est souvent commode de

prendre un exemple invent^" (Butor 10). While he is suggesting that novels can be used

to illustrate a particular theory rather than arguing that they should be written in the

service of them—which would be an entirely objectionable position from Saer's

perspective—it is difficult to imagine Saer ever making this kind of statement, since he

insists that novels operate on their own terms. It is not surprising, then, given claims like

thisfromButor, that there are often close matches between passages from his theory and

from his novels, such as the link between the passagefromLa modification imagining a

link between Rome and Paris and his commentary on the idea of spatial superimposition

in his essay "L'espace du roman". The link between the theory and fiction here through

the innovative idea of two combined spaces further reveals to what extent Butor's writing

is anchored in a paradigm that links cause and effect and reference with referent. By

contrast, in "la novela y la critica sociologica," implicitly targeting Lukdcs' take on the

novel, Saer argues against the idea that novels can be considered exemplary of

sociological theories; instead he insists that they be approached as individual aesthetic

objects that are evaluated on their own terms: "porque una novela no es una pieza de

museo a la que se contempla con una mezcla de curiosidad pueril, fantasia y cierta

repugnancia" (Saer 232). Given this way of speaking about the relationship between

sociological theory and the novel, Butor's idea that the novel can illustrate various

theories represents a break with Saer's approach. Saer's insistence on the singularity of

the novel as aesthetic object is one of his most consistent and passionately argued points,

and one which is at odds with Butor's position.

154
 Butor and Saer also differ regarding their views of the relationship between the

novel and mass culture. While they formulate the terms of the argument in similar ways,

where Saer argues that mass culture threatens literature, Butor sees this context as an

opportunity for books to evolve, and even predicts that it will cause them to become more

dense and interesting. Saer's discussion of the novel with relationship to the marketplace

recalls Butor's "Le livre comme objet:" "de todos los generos literarios tradicionales, la

novela, por su capacidad de transmision ideologica, es el unico que alcanza, en la era de

la industria cultural, el estatuto de mercancia" (Saer 123). For Saer and the nouveau

roman writers the fact that the novel is obliged to compete in the marketplace is

problematic. The reliance on Butor's framework makes sense in an essay where he

begins with a discussion of the nouveau roman as a crucial point of reference for any

commentary on the genre of the novel in the twentieth century.

In his essay "Le livre comme objet" Butor explores similar questions as those

Saer looks at in "La literatura y los nuevos lenguajes," (1969) especially the place of the

book or literature in the context of a society increasingly driven by consumerism, one

which threatens to make the book an object of consumption. Butor's object of study is

the book while Saer focuses on literature more broadly, yet both are ports of entry into a

discussion of a question that concerns most of the writers associated with the nouveau

roman, the place of literature in an age of consumer culture, or as Walter Benjamin's

essay describes it, "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." After an

extended consideration of the way non-literary mediums like film and music can enrich

literature, Saer builds towards a scathing criticism of the impact of the mass media on

fiction:

155
 Ese cine es ya un lenguaje coherente y la literature puede a veces enriquecerse
con 61. Pero los otros productos de la cultura de masas se apropian de la literatura
y la detienen, la retardan. Cuando los medios de comunicaci6n de masas ponen
de moda cierta literatura, en vez de favorecer el desarrollo de nuevas formas, lo
retardan. La moda, detras de una apariencia de fluidez y de cambio perpetuo es,
al contrario, una forma de detencion (Saer, 208)... la cultura de masas, industria y
estimulo del fantaseo, es el enemigo mortal de la literatura (Saer, 210).

This formulation couldn't be more different than the collapse of the boundary between

high and low culture associated with postmodernism, perhaps best exemplified in the

Soutiiern Cone by Alberto Fuguet's theory of McOndo, even though Saer's article was

written more than twenty-five years earlier.10 The phrase McOndo, coined by Fuguet and

Sergio Gomez, is a response to Garcia Marquez's fictional world Macondo. In contrast

to the rural settings presented through the use of magical realism in many of Garcia

Marquez's most influential novels, Fuguet seeks to establish a literature of a generation

defined by McDonald's, Macintosh and Condominiums (Fuguet). The fiction associated

with Mcondo is marked by descriptions of poverty, urban and suburban settings, and

references to popular culture. While Saer shares with Fuguet the mission of creating

literature that breaks from the paradigm established by writers associated with the Latin

American boom like Garcia Marquez, his approach to doing so takes a divergent

direction. While Fuguet consciously seeks to break down the distance between high and

low traditions by incorporating popular references into his fiction, Saer views mass

culture as a threat to literature; his artistic sensibility thus preserves the division between

high and low forms.

Butor takes a different approach to the question of the place of literature in a

culture of mass production in "Le livre comme objet". Before entering into a detailed

discussion of the various ways writers have experimented with the visual layout of books,
10
Saer's article was published in 1969, while Fuguet and Sergio G6mez's McOndo was published in 1996.
156
Butor explains his argument. The way he sets it up makes it sound as if he will condemn

consumer culture like Saer. After wondering why the status of book as object is so often

forgotten, he takes a more tolerant approach toward the role of consumer culture than

Saer, a sign of the position he will establish later in the essay more firmly. The thrust of

his argument inverts conventional wisdom by showing how the promotion of books that

bear re-reading serves the best interest of publishers; they should support these texts not

out of concern for a greater good but rather because this action benefits them

economically.

The distinction Butor draws between an approach that treats books as products to

be consumed and then discarded, and one that emphasizes study and re-reading recalls

Sarraute's contrast of formalist as opposed to realist writers; for both Butor and Sarraute

the process of re-reading is key since it represents an alternative to consumerism.

Moreover, Butor's tone of concern for the place of the book in a consumer culture recalls

the tenor of Saer's discussion of the place of literature with regard to other mediums.

However, at this point the essay takes a surprising turn, because rather than arguing that

this situation predicts the demise of the book, Butor claims instead that

C'est evidemment le developpement de cette concurrence au livre qui nous oblige

a repenser celui-ci sous tous ses aspects. C'est elle en fait qui d£barrassera de
tous les malentendus qui l'encombrent encore, qui lui rendra sa dignite de
monument, et remettra au premier plan tous les aspects que la poursuite forcenee
d'une rapidite de consommation de plus en plus grande avait fait passer sous
silence... Le journal, la radio, la television, le cinema vont obliger le livre a
devenir de plus en plus « beau », de plus en plus dense. De l'objet de
consommation au sens le plus trivial du terme, on passe a l'objet d'dtude et de
contemplation, qui nourrit sans se consumer, qui transforme la facon dont nous
connaissons et bous habitons Punivers (Butor 109)

Envisioning a time when the book will be regarded as a monument, like a statue, Butor

asserts that it can be productive rather than harmful for the book to have to compete in

157
the marketplace. When this occurs, he argues, rather than simply being consumed, it

will be studied and contemplated, nourishing and transforming the reader. His use of the

term "nourrir" suggests a physical metaphor that contrasts the effect of fast food with a

more satisfying type of nourishment.

Butor's position recalls that of Benjamin by emphasizing the positive impact of

mass production on the work of art, yet while Benjamin attributes this to the

demythologization, the removal of the "aura" of the individual work of art, Butor

attributes it to what he predicts will be an increase in the book as a more enduring object

that will be highly prized rather than read only once and thrown out, like any object of

consumption. The similarity in the way Saer and Butor set up the terms of the debate

may simply be a result of the fact that this question was especially in the air at the time

when these two articles were written, yet Butor's essay may also have been a point of

reference for Saer in developing his ideas on this topic. Nevertheless the divergent

directions in which the two writers take the question, Butor emphasizing the

opportunities this situation presents, Saer stressing the need to protect literature against

the threat posed by mass culture, highlights their contrasting spirits. Whereas Saer

stresses the threat that mass culture poses to the novel, Butor instead emphasizes that this

competition not only can but will cause the novel to become a denser object worthy of

study. This kind of optimism is foreign to the spirit of Saer's writing, which elevates

warning and tension to the level of a literary principle.

Butor and Saer also differ with regard to the question of transformation. Both

writers highlight the notion of the transformation of the reader through his experience

with a text, yet whereas Butor emphasizes the practical consequences of this moment,

158
Saer stresses the experience the reader has when transported by the textfromthe external

world to a private and created one. Saer thus explores the same concept of alteration that

interests Butor, but adapts it to his own aesthetic theory and concerns. Contemporary as

it sounds, the notion of transformation of the reader by a text has a history that Saer traces

back to Don Quijote: "A partir del Quijote, el tema de la transformation a traves de la

lectura se ha vuelto clasico" (Saer 39). In his essay "Recherches sur la technique du

roman," Butor remarks "elles transforment la facon dont nous voyons et racontons le

monde, et par consequent transforment le monde. Un tel "engagement" ne vaut-il pas

tous les efforts ?" (Butor 90). What he has in mind is not Sartre's concept of political

change, but rather a notion of an internal change in the reader.

Especially in his essays on Cervantes and Faulkner, Saer draws on this notion of

how the text transforms the reader. The theme of the conversion of the reader parallels

the notion of the alteration in the perception of the characters within the novel. In

"Lineas del Quijote," he refers to "el tema de la lectura como medio de revelation, de

transfiguracion del mundo y de transformacidn de la persona" (Saer 38) and in the

beginning of his essay on Faulkner "El mundo transfigurado" he states "en unas pocas

horas de lectura me habia convertido en otra persona, pero tambien el mundo habia sido

transfigurado" (73). Saer's use of the term "transfiguracion" suggests that he views the

moment of alteration in perception as an experience that is almost spiritual. Saer takes

Butor's concept of transformation of the reader, but gives it a different valence. While

Butor employs the term to mean a change in the reader that may have practical

implications, Saer takes up the idea in an aesthetic sense that refers to a personal and

particular relationship between an individual reader and a text. Butor's notiqn of

159
transformation has a moralizing quality whereby the text teaches the reader to see and

think in new ways, while Saer emphasizes the way a work of fiction can create a world so

intense and original that it transcends external reality and prompts the reader to enter into

a type of alternative dimension. The concept of renovation that Saer elaborates in his

essays is also a useful tool for understanding what one could argue are the unifying and

most distinguishing aspects of his fiction, the scenes where a character, in a moment of

intense reflection where Saer's language becomes especially dense and poetic, sees the

world or an object in a fresh way.

The differences in the fiction of Saer and Butor reflect the contrast in their

theoretical positions. While both La modification and L 'emploi du temps experiment

with form,11 their intelligibility is consistent with Butor's views of language. La

modification tells the story of a protagonist travelling on a train from Paris, where he

lives with his wife, to Rome, where his mistress lives, with the intention of taking his

mistress back with him to start a new life with her in France. However, during the course

of the train ride, the unnamed protagonist reverses his plan and returns to his wife in Paris

without ever exiting the train, a change of plan to which the "modification" of the title

refers. Butor uses the second person narrative form to tell a story that juxtaposes Paris,

associated with his marriage of convention and monotonous existence as a salesman, with

Rome, associated with the excitement of his Italian mistress. While his innovative use of

the second person implicates the reader in a way that recalls some of the experiments of

Robbe-Grillet, the binary opposition that the text sets up between Paris and Rome is

consistent with a more linear approach to narrative than the projects undertaken by Saer,

Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute.

11
L 'emploi du temps is told in the form of a diary and La modification entirely in the second person.
160
 The contrast that Butor sets up between the cold, stultifying atmosphere of Paris

on the one hand and the warm vibrancy of Rome on the other most corresponds in Saer's

oeuvre to the opposition between Paris and the Santa Fe province in Lapesquisa. The

wintry weather and hyper-urban landscape of Paris presents a striking difference from the

heat and rural geography of Colastine and Rinc6n; the fact that it is December in both

places serves to highlight the inversion of seasons between northern and southern

hemispheres. Saer's setting of the murder story in Paris undermines any notion that the

Argentinian characters discussing it might have that France, the supposed paragon of

civilization, might be free from acts of extreme violence. Nevertheless, the subtlety of

Saer's language and the incorporation of these spatial descriptions into the fabric of the

narrative breaks from Butor's handling of the same theme, which reads as an example of

his theory of space rather than the creation of a independent fictional world that takes on

a life of its own.

The theme of infidelity in Butor's novel appears in several works in Saer's

corpus, perhaps La ocasion (1986) most prominently. However, whereas Butor's text

focuses on the character of the adulterous husband, Saer's novel, like Robbe-Grillet's La

jalousie (1957), examines the psychological state of a husband who believes that his wife

is being unfaithful. While La modification establishes clearlyfromthe outset that the

protagonist has an Italian mistress who lives in Rome, one of the main sources of anxiety

for the husbands in the novels by Robbe-Grillet and Saer is their inability to prove that

their wives are cheating. Thus their jealousy is exacerbated by an awareness that this

very reaction may in fact be unwarranted. This doubt is not incidental nor particular to

these novels, but rather part of a broader and deliberate aesthetic that Saer describes as

161
the systematic principle of uncertainty, discussed in greater detail in chapter two in

connection with Robbe-Grillet. In contrast to the sense of closure that Butor's novel

provides, the uncertainty that Saer deliberately incorporates into his novels gives them an

open-ended quality. This effect is consistent in the tradition of Argentinian letters with

the approach to the novel outlined by Macedonio Fernandez, which Saer, in addition to

Julio Cortazar, endorsed.

A significantly more complex and ambitious novel than La modification,

L 'emploi du temps tells the story of French man Jacques Revel's experience living in the

small industrial English town of Bleston, where he competes for the affections of two

women and becomes embroiled in an investigation of a potential crime that is linked to a

novel entitled "Le meurtre de Bleston". As several critics have remarked, L 'emploi du

temps is structured on the model of the detective novel, apparently recalling the

refashioning of this genre that we see in the work of Robbe-Grillet and Saer. The novel

does contain reflections on the genre of the detective novel and an awareness of the

problems of language. However, in contrast to Saer's Lapesquisa, or even Robbe-

Grillet's Les gommes or Le voyeur, Butor's rewriting of the detective novel depends less

on intertextuality. While the analogous novels by Robbe-Grillet and Saer sometimes read

as if their main concern is to dialogue with the precedents set in detective fiction by the

analytical detective tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, or the

hardboiled tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, in spite of being set in

England, Butor's novel doesn't tie in clearly with either of these paradigms.

Nevertheless, the innovative use of the diary form draws attention to the constructed

quality of the narrative and enriches the inquiry into the question of representation.

162
Through the voice of George Burton, author of the novel within the novel, Butor places

special emphasis on the theorization of time in the detective novel, arguing that events in

this type of text must be presented in a non-linear fashion since that is the way they are

experienced. However, while Robbe-Grillet and Saer elevate the theme of violence in

their detective novels to a literary principle which creates an atmosphere of tension and

threat, in Butor this quality is pushed to the sidelines. Instead, even though he returns to

France without either of the women he desired and without having resolved the crime in

any definitive fashion, in La modification protagonist Jacques Revel's quest for meaning

takes precedence.

Conclusion: Saer and Butor

What does it mean then, that Saer on the one hand speaks admiringly of Butor

while on the other hand forging an aesthetic that differs in fundamental ways from him?

Perhaps Butor's work represents a model that he reacts against. However, it is interesting

that while he openly takes issue with certain points made by Ricardou, as discussed in

chapter two, he does not do the same with Butor, instead discussing him in laudatory

terms, while on the other hand taking positions that clearly oppose those of Butor. Given

Saer's praise of Butor one would expect to find substantial continuities between their

respective projects, yet this is not the case. The fact that he expresses admiration for

Butor's essays, but doesn't specify which claims he endorses makes sense considering

the differences between their writings. His brief claims hide these discrepancies,

absolving him from the need to substantiate his statements. Saer and Butor share certain

basic positions, like the call for the discovery of new forms in the novel and the

163
opposition to the idea that novelists have an obligation to write in service of a political

agenda. Both were also active essayists who wrote on a diverse and eclectic variety of

topics. However, a more careful look at the substance of their projects reveals just how

different they are, providing an example of a writer with whom Saer allies himself while

undertaking a fundamentally divergent literary endeavor. Moreover, in spite of the fact

that several of Butor's novels were published by Editions de Minuit, the same publisher

of the other key figures of the nouveau roman, his work differs in key ways from theirs,

demonstrating the variety of literary missions that the movement encompasses.

Not unlike what he does with the lessons he learns from translating Sarraute's

texts, Saer takes certain pointsfromhis encounter with Butor, but puts them to use in

service of his own project, remaining consistent with his professed belief in the need for a

writer to develop an individual aesthetic: "la voluntad de construir una obra personal, un

discurso unico, retomado sin cesar para ser enriquecido, afinado, individualizado en

cuanto al estilo, hasta el punto de que el hombre que esta detras se convierte en su propio

discurso y termina por identificarse con el" (Saer 267). For example, he takes up Butor's

point that one of Balzac's chief innovations was the use of reappearing characters, but

employs it to argue that Balzac's work represents a literary tradition from which

contemporary novelists must separate themselves.

Butor's hopeful prediction that the competition between books and other objects

in the marketplace will compel the book to become denser represents a marked

distinction in tonefromthe concerned essays of Robbe-Grillet, which discuss outdated

concepts in fiction and rebut perceived misunderstandings, or Sarraute's emphasis on the

suspicious relationship between reader and author, or the warnings of Saer against the

164
dangers posed by mass culture to literature. This upbeat tone in his essays goes hand in

hand with novels in which characters develop and are presented with opportunities to

learn, in contrast to the principles of uncertainty, violent tension and ambivalence that

govern thefictionof Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute and Saer. This is not to say that Butor's

novels are not concerned with consequential questions or that their conclusions are

uniformly optimistic; clearly this is not the case. However, at least in the essay "Le livre

comme objet," he strikes a tone that is practically unthinkable in the work of Saer.

Butor's La modification and L 'emploi du temps are also centered on major events that

contrast with the preoccupation in Saer, Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute with descriptions of

objects, apparently trivial daily events and repetition that forge an aesthetic of the

particular and small. In this sense, the surprising commentaries in Butor's essays, like

the one on Balzac, are not peculiar aberrations or deliberate jabs intended to provoke

debate from a writer whose project otherwise fits with his nouveau roman colleagues, but

rather indicative of writing that departsfromtheirs while still sharing their pursuit of new

forms and opposition to the Sartrean call for litterature engagee.

However, Butor's work also demonstrates how an interest in new forms can be

compatible with a relatively transparent approach to language; these two dimensions are

not mutually exclusive. To describe Butor's work in the way I have done is not to

criticize it— on the contrary his fiction is complex and imaginative, and his essays have

enriched the theory of the novel, as Saer's laudatory comments make clear—but rather to

demonstrate how his approach differs from that of Saer. An honest analysis of the

relationship between Saer and Michel Butor must recognize their differences, yet this

contrast illuminates the spirit of each writers' work.

165
 A comparison of Saer's work with Butor serves to illuminate several of its central

components. The intertextual quality so central to his fiction is also a part of his essay

writing, as shown by the way he builds on Butor's commentaries on writers like Balzac

and Joyce. Furthermore, if Butor's fiction fits so closely with his theory that it

sometimes reads as an instrument to demonstrate certain arguments, Saer's fiction

exemplifies his insistence that fiction takes precedence over theory. Even if we can

connect ideas from Saer's critical essays with passages in his novels, the fiction operates

on its own terms. A major reason for this effect is that Saer's novels are founded on an

effort to create dense, rigorous language, in contrast to Butor's novels, which employ

language as a tool to propel the narrative forward. Saer's novels tell stories, but they are

also replete with passages where the creation of rigorous, difficult language is an end in

itself. Finally, by contrasting Saer with Butor we can see how he uses the systematic

principle of uncertainty to create open-ended narratives that compel the reader to grapple

with the meaning of the very act of reading.

166
 Chapter Five: Unity of Place and Character: Saer and Claude Simon

When critics write about the nouveau roman they gravitate towards the

emblematic figures associated with the movement, Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute (and even

Butor), but they tend to exclude Claude Simon; as a result the ties between the work of

Saer and Simon tend to be overlooked by critics, perhaps to an even greater extent than

his link to Sarraute. Perhaps this pattern stemsfromthe fact that Simon's work does not

fit neatly into the category of the nouveau roman,1 leading critics interested in the

movement to neglect him. Indeed, throughout most of his literary career, Simon was

very little known outside of France, a state of affairs that has never changed significantly.

The only figure associated with the nouveau roman to have won the Nobel Prize (in

1985), Simon's work owes an especially strong debt to the tradition of Anglo-American

modernism exemplified by Faulkner and Joyce; in some ways his writing style and

concerns bear more in common with these illustrious predecessors than with his French

contemporaries. The fact that at the level of his prose Saer's work could be said to

parallel that of Simon more than any of the other writers of the nouveau roman suggests

the debt he too owes to the tradition of modernism. Unlike the other figures associated

with the nouveau roman, Simon is known almost exclusively for hisfictionrather than

his essays, a quality that partly explains his mixed feelings about being associated with

the group. In spite of this ambivalence, gestures like Ricardou's organization of a second

conference at Cerisy in 1974 entirely devoted to Simon's work function as attempts to

claim him as part of their circle. Yet, if Simon's writing seems to embody a different

1
Although, for reasons that I will explain, it ultimately still makes sense to group him with them.
2
Ricardou, Jean, Claude Simon: analyse, theorie, Paris: UGE, 1975.
167
type of project than Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, his call for the French novel to forge a

path that breaks from the nineteenth century realist tradition and his opposition to the

Sartrean claim regarding commitment, the two most basic defining qualities of the

movement, suffice to justify associating him with the nouveau ronton. Not only did

Simon participate in their conference at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1971,3 he also wrote an article

defending Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman against Sartre's charge that they neglect

the third world and write instead for the bourgeoisie.4 Finally, whereas his first four

novels had been published by lesser known presses, starting with Le Vent in 1957,

Simon's novels began to be published by the more prestigious Editions de Minuit, the

same house that published the other major nouveau roman figures Robbe-Grillet,

Sarraute, Butor and Robert Pinget, leading to the label "ecole de Minuit" (Britton 2-22).

Some of the key points of connection between the work of Simon and Saer

include the following: use of the figure of the horse; graphic, yet poetic descriptions of

heterosexual desire and copulation, in terms that sometimes link the animal and human

realms; more accessible characterization than in Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, in spite of

their dispensation with psychoanalytical analyses of characters; a debt to Faulkner

detectable at the level of the prose, more so than for the other writers associated with the

nouveau roman; dense and rigorous language that doesn't always transmit meaning; use

of the concept of transformation to describe the relationship between part and whole.

The question of the relationship between autobiography and fiction that was of

particular interest to Sarraute also has relevance for the work of Simon. Despite the fact

3
The same conference where Saer gave his "Notas sobre el nouveau roman," 'Le Nouveau Roman: hier,
aujourd'hui'.
4
See "Pour qui done €cht Sartre ?" in L 'Express 28 May 1964, p. 33.
168
that many of his works are rooted in his personal experience in World War II and the

Spanish Civil War, Simon's novels are fictional works of art rather than autobiography.

Simon's presentation of himself as a non-intellectual writer and his resistance to

distinguishing between his autobiography and his fiction (Britton) can be read as casting

doubt on the notion that autobiography is truth while fiction is invention, but to

understand it as meaning that his fiction is a mere transcription of his experience, as

Simon himself sometimes has done, would be to dramatically underestimate the skill and

imagination he brings to his art.

The work of Saer and Simon is especially marked by the influence of Faulkner.

Much of the literature that discusses the connection between Latin American writers and

Faulkner concentrates on the especially enthusiastic reception that he received in this

region;5 however, rather than simply looking at a link between Faulkner and Saer, by

adding Simon to the equation we can see how the influence of Faulkner can also be

contextualized more broadly in terms of patterns of literary relations that transcend

geographical limitations. Saer is especially critical of the tendency to account for the

impact of Faulkner in Latin America by referring to historical parallels between the U.S.

south and Spanish-America; he aims to unmoor the attachment of writers in each area

from their given geographical region by accounting for the connection in terms of literary

technique. Saer thus reads Faulkner not as a distinctly southern writer, but rather as an

exceptional novelist whose literary innovations had a tremendous impact worldwide.

In one of his essays on the southern master, Saer describes his first early exposure to

Faulkner through his reading of As I Lay Dying, which he presents in terms that leave no

5
See In Search of the Latin American Faulkner by Fayen, among others.
169
doubt this was a formative experience for him as a writer. Saer also remarked at one

point that he went through a stage where he was stultified by the attempt to escape the

tremendous impact that the work of Faulkner had had upon him: "Yo he pasado diez anos

de mi vida tratando de escapar al influjo de Faulkner: los narradores que mas el narrador

admira han de ser, paradqjicamente, el tabu mas dificil de infringir" (Saer 149).

Eventually Saer did discover a way to get beyond simply imitating the work of Faulkner.

From the very opening lines of one of his crowning achievements, La Route des

Flandres (1960), it is clear that the ghost of Faulkner also hangs over the work of Simon.

The connection between the two is so evident that "Simon's early work had been

criticized as a mere imitation of William Faulkner" (Britton 27), a claim that, while not

entirely unjustified, is ultimately unfair and reductive, for reasons that I hope to make

clear. Some of the most explicit connections between the two writers that are particularly

evident in Absalom Absalom! and La Route des Flandres include the following elements:

a fragmented, non-linear narrative; long sentences and few paragraph breaks, dense

forests of text which the reader must decipher; use of the present continuous tense to

describe events when the more common convention would dictate the use of the present

or past simple tense; a stream of consciousness technique that reveals the imperfect

thought process of a character rather than a polished prose surface; language that employs

metaphors to describe people as manifestations of abstract forces; and the creation of a

vivid literary world situated in a marginalized rural setting.

One way the work of both Simon and Saer, then, can be read is as an attempt to

absorb the Faulknerian innovations in a creative rather than an imitative fashion. Indeed,

6
See "El mundo transfigurado" in La narracion-objeto.
170
according to a reporter for the Argentinian newspaper "La Nacion" writing just after

Saer's death in 2005,

Saer habia leido tempranamente a los autores del nouveau roman, como habia
leido a Faulkner mediados de los alios 50... Y admiraba la escritura de algunos de
ellos; especialmente, y, con razon, la de Claude Simon, el mayor de todos, en
quien veia una efectiva sintesis de Faulkner y del nouveau roman (Goloboff)7.

Given the typical pattern in the criticism of regarding Robbe-Grillet as the standout of the

group, the statement that Simon was "el mayor de todos" is intriguing, yet also justifiable

considering the excellence of his fiction. I am not sure what Goloboff s source is for this

information—perhaps his own experience as a friend of Saer—but while his assertion

that of the nouveau roman writers the one Saer most admired was Simon contrasts with

the general tendency to link Saer with Robbe-Grillet, it is consistent with the

commonalities between Saer and Simon. Moreover, it makes sense that Saer would see

in Simon a successful blending of Faulkner with nouveau roman techniques, since these

are two of the main currents that Simon draws upon.8 While the methods associated with

the nouveau roman are not as evident in La route desflandres,they are more identifiable

in some of Simon's later novels, like Legon de choses (1975).

Simon accomplishes this project by combining Faulknerian language and literary

devices with an interest in the Second World War in Europe and the use of a particularly

fragmented narrative. For his part, Saer employs certain fundamental elements of the

Faulknerian model yet uses them to reflect on the act of writing, in a spirit that breaks

from Faulkner's focus on historical events that can be more clearly tied to a referent.

Compared to Faulkner, Saer's fiction is more focused on writing, more self-referential.

7
Goloboff, La Nacidn, Buenos Aires, 19 de Junio de 2005.
8
Keeping in mind Simon's complex relationship with the nouveau roman, discussed earlier.
171
For example, Saer's textsfrequentlycontain writer characters, detailed discussions of

literary questions and novels within the novel; these elements are much less common in

Faulkner's fiction. While Faulkner's complex and thoroughgoing concern with the

question of race is a central part of his work, Saer's fascination with taking highly

codified genres, like the detective and the historical novels, and rewriting them, is

consistent with his reflection on the act of writing and part of what distinguishes him

from the master southern novelist. Saer himself has acknowledged the importance of

Faulkner for the work of certain nouveau roman writers:

La influencia de Faulkner ha sido considerable, y no unicamente en la literatura

en lengua inglesa. Tambi&i enfrancesfue importante, en los escritores
existencialistas de posguerra como Sartre y Camus, que escribieron sobre el,
adoptaron algunos de sus procedimientos y lo adoptaron para el teatro, y tambten
en ciertos escritores del Nouveau Roman, como Claude Simon, Michel Butor y
Claude Oilier" (Saer 76).

I will not be studying the work of Oilier here and I contend that the impact of Faulkner is

difficult to detect in the fiction of Butor, while the connection to Simon is evident.

To read Faulkner through the lens of a French literary movement makes sense since it

was in Paris that the genius of the southern novelist's fiction was first broadly

recognized,9 as Saer perceives here; outside of a few perceptive critics who praised his

work early on, his greatness was only broadly acknowledged later in literary circles in the

United States. By now, of course, the impact of Faulkner is worldwide. One of the main

objectives of the nouveau roman as a whole is to create forms in the novel that take into

account the innovations of Anglo-American modernism, thus to reckon with Faulkner is

one of their foremost challenges.

9
See Casanova p. 130-131.
172
 Simon, Faulkner and Saer create highly original literary worlds out of

marginalized, rural spaces that are characterized by defeat. The sense of failure is one of

the elements that unifies the history of the southern United States and Latin America,

contributing to the appeal of the work of Faulkner in the latter region (Cohn). Garcia

Marquez's comments on this question suggest that he explains this phenomenon with a

similar type of reasoning (Guibert).10 Saer frequently criticizes the work of the

Colombian Nobel Prize winner, and especially his claim justifying Faulkner's appeal in

Latin America on the basis of shared history between the two southern regions:

Por eso, cuando cierto escritor caribefio pretende que si su obra y la de Faulkner
se parecen es porque Colombia y el deep south son lugares muy parecidos, y
porque Faulkner es un escritor latinoamericano avante la lettre, no nos queda mas
remedio que pensar que esa influencia es superficial, y que por su caracter
vergonzante proyecta mas resentimiento que admiration sobre el modelo (Saer
77).

In keeping with his general theoretical tendencies, Saer seeks to emphasize Faulkner's

formal innovations and creation of a vivid and autonomous literary universe,

downplaying the historical parallels between north and south as well as the links between

fictional text and historical referent. Nevertheless, without entering into an evaluation of

the validity of this criticism, it is safe to say that the theme of defeat plays an important

role in the fiction of Saer, Simon and Faulkner, regardless of whether it is based on an

externally verifiable history or not. While I will not be considering his work in detail

here, Garcia Marquez's project set in the imaginary world of Macondo follows the same

basic principles that Balzac established—namely, the writing of interconnected novels

"I was born in Aracataca, the banana growing country where the United Fruit Company was established.
It was in this region, where thefruitcompany was building towns and hospitals and draining some zones,
that I grew up and received my first impressions. Then, many years later, I read Faulkner and found that
his whole workl—the world of the southern United States which he writes about—was very like my world,
that it was created by the same people... What I found in him was affinities between our experiences, which
were not as different as might appear at first sight."
173
that repeat characters and recur to the same settings-and Faulkner, Simon and Saer also

employed in the twentieth century. While Saer's confrontational tone reflects his

exaggeration of his differences with Garcia Marquez, perhaps in an effort to separate

himselffromthe Colombian Nobel Prize winner, his basic point reflects several more

substantive differences between the two writers that pertain to the use of magical realism

and the sense of what it means to be a writerfromLatin America.

One of the main features common to the work of Faulkner, Simon, and Saer is the

repetition of characters from one novel to another, creating a unified and interconnected

body of work. This quality is all the more interesting since it stretches back to Balzac

and is not present in any of the other nouveau roman writers I have studied here except

Simon. Part of the effect of this technique is a sense offragmentationin each individual

novel that compels a reader to study the other novels by the same author in order to

obtain a fuller picture of the different storylines and characters, and to gain possession of

the other pieces that make up the puzzle. This approach functions as a wink to those

familiar with the oeuvre, creating a privileged world of readers who have a particular

understanding of the novels. This effect is not as extreme as in a novel like Joyce's

Ulysses, where the reader is forced to be aware of numerous allusions, lest he miss

meanings that are fundamental to understanding the work. In the fiction of Faulkner,

Saer and Simon, each novel is intended to function perfectly well independently, yet at

the same time one's reading of a single text will differ if he has read others by the same

author. However, this background is not necessarily preferable, since one might also

argue that not having read other novels by the same author affords the reader the

174
advantage of approaching the textfromother angles rather than being predisposed to read

in the broader context of the author's oeuvre.

The work of Simon, Saer and Faulkner is also marked by an "unidad de lugar," to

borrow the titlefromSaer's 1966 short story collection. Character and place are an

appropriate fit here as part of a broader project of literary unity. In contrast to a writer

like Butor, whose written production is divided more equally between different genres,

the prolific production of narrative fiction demonstrates that Saer, Simon and Faulkner

were all novelists first and foremost.11 A strong case can be made for linking these three

writers not only on the basis of their creation of an interconnected body of novels that

repeat characters and storylines, but also in terms of their literary universes set in a

single, rural and marginalized space,fromFaulkner's Yoknapatawpha county in the US

south to Saer's litoral/Santa Fe region of Argentina to Simon's southern France centered

in the town of Perpignan. All of these areas are juxtaposed against the metropolitan

spaces that are centers of power,fromNew York and Boston in the US (Faulkner) to

Buenos Aires in Argentina (Saer) to Paris, France (Simon). In Faulkner's

Yoknapatawpha county, the characters' awareness of their residence in the peripheral

south emerges through details like the Compson family's selling of a large chunk of their

land in order to send Quentin to school at Harvard, and comments like the following from

Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury: "I don't see how a city no bigger than New

York can hold enough people to take the money awayfromus country suckers. Work

like hell all day every day, send them your money and get a little piece of paper back"

(Faulkner 292). In Simon's La route desflandres this sense of marginality is reflected in

11
Even while Saer and especially Faulkner identified themselves at certain times as poets, and Simon
began his artistic career as a painter, their literary production tells a different story: Faulkner published
nineteen novels, Simon twenty, Saer twelve.
175
the fact that for the soldiers who are the main characters in the novel the central fronts of

the battle in World War II are nowhere in sight; they are totally out of contact with the

brunt of the fighting, lost on the fringes of the action. There are few identifiable

references to German soldiers and no sense of the Nazi occupation of Paris. In Saer's

novels, the powerful presence of Buenos Aires lurks as a place that the characters can

visit and with which they must reckon. Thus Simon, Faulkner and Saer approach the

marginal spaces where they set their narratives as fascinating in their own right and as an

angle from which to explore the hegemony of the capitals.

It is not incidental that, having grown up in a southern region of France not far

from the border with Spain, Simon participated in the Spanish Civil War, an event which

he thematizes in several of his novels, in addition to employing at least one character with

a (possibly) Spanish surname, creating an interesting connection with Spanish history,

if not with Spanish literature. In contrast to the criticism on Faulkner and Saer, which

rarely fails to mention the importance of their recurrence to a specific regional space, the

same quality in the work of Simon often goes unnoticed; yet Simon also quietly, in his

own way, recurs over and over again to the southern region of France centered on the

town of Perpignan where he grew up.

One main element in Simon's fiction that distinguishes him from the other

nouveau roman writers is his direct engagement with significant and identifiable

historical moments. Simon looks outward and takes on events like the Second World

12
For example, the jockey Iglesia in La route des Flandres.
13
Pascale Casanova cites the Algerian writer Rachid Boudjedra on this point in The World Republic of
Letters: "All of Claude Simon's novels take place in and around Perpignan. The whole world of his books
unfolds in this small city and the village [outside of it]...It's the South that makes me feel close to Claude
Simon because he spoke of the women of the 1930's [in Perpignan] exactly as I speak of the women of the
1990's in Algeria: the confinement, the heat..." (Casanova 342).
176
War, in works like La Route des Flandres, relying less on the self-reflexive focus on the

act of writing that we see in Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute. The Second World War, the

same event that had caused some of the nouveaux romanciers to sever the link between

literature and history, in Simon becomes the site for a meditation on the nature of war.

However, rather than foregrounding the events of the war itself, Simon uses them to

create a background against which he explores the interactions between the characters in

his narrative. Similarly, in his novels that deal with the years of the last military

dictatorship in Argentina, Lo Imborrable, Nadie nada nunca, and Glosa, rather than

making the historical event itself the focus of the action, Saer uses it to create a tense

atmosphere. Yet, if Saer and Simon create tension through reflection on external events

that can be considered historical, Simon's novels, like those of Faulkner, are not filled

with writer characters and the frequent references to the act of writing that we see in Saer;

in this sense they are less self-reflexive than Saer's novels. However, Simon's fiction

thematizes the conditions of its own possibility through engagement with questions of

representation and language.

Saer invokes the work of Simon in the course of a discussion of the sources of

narrative in "La cancion material" (1973). This essay, which begins and ends with a

similar argument that implicitly critiques Garcia Mdrquez's claim that he is merely

narrating the stories told to him by his grandmother and the idea of nationally specific

narrative content, is not a study of songs in a literal sense, as the title implies, but rather a

claim, based on a distinction between what Saer calls the real and the material, that

narrative makes the material sing: "La narracion consiste, por lo tanto, en hacer cantar lo

material—o sea el material" (Saer 167). Saer argues that narrative does not draw on the

177
real, but rather the material, which acquires meaning only in the context of the text, and is

empty prior to it:

esa materialidad es indescriptible a priori, refractaria a la clasificacion discursiva,

y es unicamente la narration, a travel de su forma, la que puede darle, a ese
magma neutro, un sentido. Narrar no consiste en copiar lo real sino en inventarlo,
en construir imagenes historicamente verosimiles de ese material privado de signo
que, gracias a su transformacidn por medio de la construccidn narrativa, podra al
fin, incorporado en una coherencia nueva, coloridamente, significar (167-8).

The idea that narrating is not copying reality but rather inventing it is not, of course, a

new claim, and Saer himself expresses this idea in other places in his own work, but this

is a particularly forceful formulation of the notion. As in "La no vela y la critica

sociologica," Saer also critiques the Lukacsian account of the novel as representative of

the idea that narrative reflects reality. Finally, the essay is striking for the call for the

discovery of narrative techniques that go beyond those of Anglo-American modernism

and objectivism, since at this point to employ these devices would be derivative.

The concept of universality that Saer discusses in "La cancion material" goes

hand in hand with the project of interconnected novels through repetition of place and

character to create a broader sense of literary unity. While Saer wants to argue against a

certain kind of universality, his writing is shot through with language and imagery that

invoke it. He wants to break away from the notion of universality, arguing instead that

the material that a given narrative uses gains a specific meaning in that context: "El

caballo freudiano, por ejemplo, portador de un signo que se pretende universal, seria otro

paradigma negativo, que hasta el menos esclarecido de los caballos refutaria" (Saer 168-

9). It is not clear how the new and surprising meaning that a given subject acquires in

the context of a narrative is inconsistent with that material also being universal. In any

case, Saer wants to break away from the idea of horses in different national contexts

178
having divergent meanings; for him a horse in Argentina is not any different than a horse

in Mississippi. Rather than the specificity of a horse being determined by the nationality

or an external referent, Saer locates it in the literary use that a particular text makes of it.

Rather than attributing the differences between horses to the respective nations in which

they are set, Saer traces these particularities back to the varying uses each writer makes of

them; the horses of Faulkner, Saer and Simon are different not because they are from

different nations but because each one of their literary projects is unique.

While his commentaries in this essay suggest that the universal is a question of

ambivalence and tension for Saer, his fiction, like that of Faulkner and Simon, is marked

by language that invokes a universalist spirit. For example their use of imagery from the

realms of astronomy and evolution creates a sense that they aim to explore a human

condition that transcends specific national contexts or historical moments. Even in his

Nobel prize speech, Faulkner emphasizes literature as a tool for exploring human nature.

Furthermore, Saer considers how the French author's representation of the figure of the

horse has been connected by critics with the broader question of universality: "esa critica

tematica que nos dice que La Route des Flandres, por ejemplo, y tal vez en toda la obra

de Claude Simon, el tema del caballo predomina. El caballo tematico se convierte en un

universal: hay caballo porque hay detras, anticipadamente, un sentido, un signo, que el

caballo viene, de un modo invariable, a representar" (Saer 168). Saer rehearses the

argument of the horse as a universal theme in order to reject it and also to show how

Simon's use of the horse has been misread; as his later argument will establish he wants

to break from the idea of a horse whose meaning is established prior to its instantiation in

a literary text. He is taking issue with a certain reading that reduces Simon's work to the

179
theme of the horse which he finds problematic because it discusses the animal in

universalist terms and emphasizes a theme rather than the formal innovations of the

nouveau roman writer. Yet his fiction employs universalizing language, creating a

tension between this tendency on the one hand and his desire to emphasize the specific

use of a given image in a literary text on the other.

He discusses Simon's representation of the horse alongside Faulkner and the great

nineteenth century Argentinian author of the epic poem about the figure of the gaucho,

Jose Hernandez:

Sin embargo, el caballo de Faulkner, para tomar otra obra narrativa en la que
abundan los caballos, tanto como en la obra de Simon, o incluso en el Martin
Fierro, no equivale al caballo de Simon o al de Jose Hernandez....Mas pertinente
que imaginar un caballo previo al que vienen, por distinto camino, Simon,
Faulkner o Hernandez, como heridos por la mismo nostalgia, ligeramente
platonica, resulta, me parece, imaginar un caballo material, que tendra, en cada
contexto, no un sentido eterno y universal, sino el que nace de ese contexto,
inesperado y nuevo (Saer, 169).

Saer's placement of Simon alongside a writer of the stature of Faulkner is a marker of his

esteem for him and his linking of Simon, Faulkner and Hernandez creates an interesting

three way link between a French, U.S south and Argentinian writer, in a way that, in a

typically Saerian gesture,14 deliberately transcends not only national but also continental

boundaries, creating a grouping based on the literary representation of horse imagery. A

similar tripartite link can be drawn between Saer, Faulkner, and Simon, as I am arguing

here.

The use of the figure of the horse is one of the most readily identifiable links

between the work of Saer and Simon, and one that Saer highlights. In both Saer and

Simon horses are linked with the theme of sexuality and desire. For example, in La
14
While Saer himself, in keeping with his theoretical tendencies, wouldn't want to emphasize the national
origins of each of these writers, it is a useful way toframethis argument.
180
Route des Flandres, the narrative voice describes the mounting of a horse by a jockey in

terms that parallel the sexual coupling between protagonist Georges and Corinne that

occurs while Georges is telling the story. Moreover, the scene of the horse race where De

Reixach insists that he replace Iglesia as jockey, in a gesture that asserts his dominance

and affirms his masculinity, is a key part of the novel. In Saer's La Ocasion protagonist

Bianco's increasing anxiety over his (unconfirmed) suspicions that his wife Gina is

having an affair with his best friend causes him to recall a moment when he witnessed

Gina staring in fascination at a male horse futilely trying to mount and penetrate a female

horse. This double image of voyeurism, where Bianco is watching Gina watching the

horses, emphasizes not only that Gina is just as fascinated with sexuality as Bianco, but

also that he perceives her as an enigmatic and elusive other who remains beyond his

control and understanding. While he is able to some extent to vanquish the wild pampa

by collaborating with the bandit Juan to use wire to mark off property, Gina continues to

elude him. In another novel, Nadie nada nunca, the central theme of the mysterious

murder of horses is interspersed with scenes of the extramarital affair between Cat and

Elisa, several of which are especially graphic descriptions of their copulation, in terms

that strip the act of any element of union or emotional connection. Both authors, then,

employ horse imagery as a way to develop human sexual desire in terms that emphasize

its animalistic nature.

Yet Simon and Saer also employ horse imagery in the opposite way, representing

horses as possessed of a highly sophisticated form of perception that supersedes human

understanding. In a scene that marks a turning point in Saer's Las nubes, which I

discussed from a different angle earlier in the chapter in connection with Michel Butor,

181
the protagonist Doctor Realfindshimself alone on the Argentinian pampa with his horse.

In a moment of insight Doctor Real senses that the horse has an understanding that he

lacks and, moreover, that he can never have complete access to the horse's world. The

protagonist sees the horse as a creature who intuitively understands the natural world in a

deeper way than humans rather than being emblematic of man's base animal nature. The

scene could be considered the denouement of the novel—because of its location towards

the end of the text and the insight that the protagonist extracts from it—and reads as a

possible originary image around which Saer may have wanted to center the narrative. In

the work of both Simon and Saer the horse is an object of fascination. In addition to

being a locus of the physicality of the text, both a metaphor and an actual site of bodily

contact, the horse is a place where the two writers study questions of perception. The

relationship between the protagonist and his horse becomes symbolic of the encounter

between self and other, where the latter resides in a universe which the former can never

totally access or understand.

Saer's commentary in "La cancion material" shows how in addition to the specific

meanings discussed above, he uses horse imagery to express some of his most

fundamental views about literature. His comment that the meaning of the horse can not

be determined beforehand, but rather only in the context of the literary text where it is

inserted is an idea that he asserts throughout his critical writings, applying it to a variety

of different tropes. His reading of the horse can also thus be considered in connection

with his broader literary aesthetic. Moreover, his take on the horse is indicative of his

approach to the representation of rural space in a fashion that breaks from the tradition of

costumbrismo. The effort to resist the tendency for the horse to acquire a meaning from

182
any forces outside of its position within a given literary text is Saer's effort to approach

rural space in a way that breaks from costumbrismo in the pursuit of a more innovative

representation. The image of the horse is a place that distills down Saer's project to its

essence, for it reveals his effort to create a literary world based in a rural setting, yet

using literary techniques inherited from modernism. In a strategy that is also common to

Simon, he takes an apparently simple topic, the horse, and subjects it to the same

questions that he brings to a more typical twentieth century literary subject, like a murder

mystery set in a metropolis.

Yet, it is not only in his commentary on the topic of horses that Saer mentions

Simon. He invokes his name nearly every time he speaks of the nouveau roman, for

example in the essays "Notas sobre el nouveau roman," "La doble longevidad del

narrador Robbe-Grillet," and "Vanguardia y narration," attaching particular importance

to Simon's having received the Nobel Prize as evidence of a certain recognition of the

nouveau roman by the literary establishment. However the more substantial evidence of

the connections between the projects of Saer and Simon occurs not at the theoretical level

or in the direct commentaries of one writer on the other, but rather in their fiction.

"Fragmentary Description of a Disaster": Simon's La route des Flandres and

Saer's Nadie nada nunca

One of Simon's greatest achievements and the second in the five novel Reixach

cycle, La route des flandres (winner of the Prix de L'Express in 1961) recounts the effort

by protagonist Georges to process his experience as part of a French brigade that was

forced to retreat during World War II. Simon's original title for the novel, "Description

fragmentaire d'un desastre" (Dallenbach 120), would serve as a fit title for Saer's Nadie

183
nada nunca (1980), which represents the atmosphere during the last military dictatorship

in Argentina through the allegory of a mysterious series of murders of horses.

The parallels between these two texts, which depict familial and personal defeat

through imagery of decay, crystallize the broader connections between the work of

Simon and Saer. Using dense and enigmatic prose appropriate to their subject matter,

both novels portray an extreme and violent event of historical importance, the "disaster"

in question. Rather than agents who help create the historical events in which they

participate, the characters in both novels are at best bystanders, at worst impotent victims.

These two novels are cornerstones in the oeuvres of the two writers, containing key

moments to which their other novels refer, the disappearance of Cat and Elisa in Nadie

nada nunca and the (possible) suicide of de Reixach in La route desflandres. Georges

obsesses over the death of de Reixach in Simon's novel, while in other texts by Saer,

such as Lapesquisa, Pichon is haunted by the disappearance of Cat and Elisa; none of

these characters is ever able to fully come to terms with the loss of the loved one.

Moreover, both novels relate these tales through the use of a fragmented structure that

develops in a cyclical rather than a linear pattern, subverting the notion of history as

progressive and teleological. Set in rural and peripheral spaces, both novels exemplify

the two writers' broader uses of the figure of the horse. They bring together descriptions

of horses with graphic portraits of adulterous, illicit, heterosexual desire and sexual

intercourse depicted from a male perspective. In Simon's novel we see this theme

through the analogy created between the mounting of a horse and the position of a man

on top of a woman in the act of coitus; in Saer's novel the reference to an ancient

Dromite sect that worshipped horses in heat condenses the point (Saer 22-5). For both

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writers, horses are not only a way to mark their rural landscapes, but also a tool to

describe the animal nature of human relations; at the same time, horses are represented,

especially in Saer's novel, as highly perceptive and sensitive creatures.

Georges' attempt to reconstruct and understand a past moment that centers on the

charismatic and mythical figure of De Reixach—his cousin whose death Georges believes

may have been a suicide—that is crucial not just for himself but also for an understanding

of the history of his nation parallels the effort in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! by

Shreve and Quentin Compson to comprehend the exploits of Thomas Sutpen. In both

novels, for all his effort to maintain distance and establish a position of objective

judgment, the protagonist is fascinated with a past event to which he is linked

inextricably. Furthermore, in both cases the focus is on the mediated nature of the story

being told, where the reader only has access to the original events through the narrator's

reconstruction of them. Saer foregrounds this same theme in Glosa, where the two

protagonists, el Matematico and Leto, can only find out about Washington's Noriega's

birthday partyfromwhat others tell them about it, since neither was present at the event

himself.

Simon's novel forces the reader into the same position as the characters within the

narrative who have to interpret the events in which they participated. The text makes no

concessions to comprehensibility, beginning in medias res and making it difficult for the

reader to decipher even the most basic elements of the plot. Skeptical of the reliability of

his memory, Georges wonders how he can establish a solid basis for his knowledge about

the present and/or past events with his brigade that he is trying to reconstruct. In the final

pages of the novel his repetition of the phrase "comment savoir, comment savoir?"

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(Simon 302) reflects the anxiety created by the inability tofirmlyestablish his version of

the events. This linguistic tic echoes Saer's use of similar techniques in Glosa, which

employs a tone that alternates between deeply philosophical and playful in its rigorous

interrogation of epistemology, where doubt is raised to the level of a literary principle.

The opening paragraph of the novel suffices to make the point: "es, si se quiere, octubre,

octubre o noviembre, del sesenta o del sesenta y uno, octubre tal vez, el catorce o el

dieciseis, o el veintidos o el veintitres tal vez, el veintitres de octubre de mil novecientos

sesenta y uno pongamos—que mas da" (Saer 13). The narrative voice almost obsessively

undercuts itself with phrases like "si se quiere," "tal vez," and "pongamos." Georges'

imagining of De Reixach's difficulty in admitting that Corinne was cuckolding him

similarly undercuts the authority of the narrative and instillsfissuresin Georges'

reconstruction of the events: "peut-£tre fut-ce seulement en arrivant qu'il trouva quelque

chose comme une preuve comme par exemple ce pale-frenier cache dans le placard,

quelque chose qui le decida, lui demontrant de facon irrefutable ce qu'il se refusait a

croire" (Simon 312). Both Saer and Simon connect the issue of doubt with the theme of

fidelity. The reflection in language of the anxiety produced by the absence of certainty

and the sense of a conscious philosophical search for this foundation is particular to their

work.

One way to read this doubt is in connection with the sense of defeat which

Faulkner, along with Simon and Saer, express using images of decomposition. A keen

awareness of the South's loss in the Civil War underwrites Faulkner's entire oeuvre. In

Simon's La Route des Flandres Georges speculates that De Reixach may have committed

suicide by allowing himself to be shot by the German sniper out of a sense of humiliation

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about the defeat of his brigade and a personal sense of shame that his wife Corinne has

cuckolded him. The image of a dead horse stands in not so much for the defeat of France

as a nation, but for Simon's specific southern region of the nation and for de Reixach's

personal sense of failure. Saer's entire body of work is marked by an effort to come to

terms with the failure of the leftist resistance movement at the hands of the brutality of

the military dictatorship in Argentina.

Many of these scenes of decay can also be read as images of transformation,

where a whole breaks down into component parts. Simon describes the dead horse, a

creature that begins as parts and acquires identity as a horse only later, as reduced to its

constituents upon death: "quelque chose d'insolite, d'irreel, d'hybride, en ce sens que ce

qui avait &e un cheval (c'est-a-dire ce qu'on savait, ce qu'on pouvait reconnaitre,

identifier comme ayant ete un cheval) n'etait plus a present qu'un vague tas de membres,

de corne, de cuir et de poils colics, aux trois quarts recouvert de boue" (Simon 26-7). In

a state of putrefaction, the body of the animal is barely recognizable as a horse.

Similarly, in a disturbing scene in Nadie nada nunca, Cat's mistress Elisa walks into a

market and observes the various cuts of meat, which the narrative voice describes in

terms that resemble a horse dissected into parts. This image recalls the tradition in

Argentina of the asado, or barbeque, yet in this context the meat is associated with the

tremendous violence occurring in the country at the time; the quartering of the cow meat

into parts for consumption stands in for the torture and murder of the victims of the

proceso. Both Saer and Simon employ the breakdown of a body of a horse into

component parts, which destroys the meaning that derives from the animal as a whole,

while also showing how the whole is constructed out of these parts; both writers use this

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imagery to create an atmosphere of violence and threat. Yet, in Saer and Simon

transformation is not a source of a triumphant cycle of birth, death and rebirth, but rather

a reminder of the impermanent state of existence. Butor and Saer highlight the concept

of transformation in the context of the relationship between a reader and a literary text;

however, Simon and Saer employ the same notion of transformation within their novels,

using it to describe modification in form. Like Simon, Saer is fascinated by the principle

of transmutation of form and uses it to great effect in his novel. In both works, the

imagery of breakdown of an entity exemplifies the way these extreme events of violence

bring about a sense of regression to a more primary state of existence. In a similar scene

in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930), which tells the story of the Bundren family's tragic-

comical odyssey across Yoknapatawpha county to bury mother/wife Addie in Jefferson,

Vardaman, the youngest of the children, has a vision of a horse dissolving into

component parts:

It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated
scattering of components—snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and
ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong
bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is.
I see him dissolve—legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames—and
float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none. I
can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape—fetlock, hip,
shoulder and hear (Faulkner 56).

Vardaman's vision expresses the dissolution of his consciousness in response to the

trauma of having lost his mother at such a young age. This scene relates to the question

of perception, while the ones from Saer and Simon deal with actual breakdowns of the

physical corpus of a horse, yet the link between the three writers via the theme of

dissolution reveals a common use of this imagery to substitute a vision of disintegration

for the idea of progress.

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 In the work of each of these three writers, the sense of defeat of a region, as I have

shown, is expressed through imagery of decomposition; however it is also represented in

the decline in status and socioeconomic position of a particular family, from the

Compson's in Faulkner, to the Garay family in Saer to the de Reixach's in Simon. In

Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury the Compson's have been forced to sell off a portion

of their land in order to finance Quentin's studies at Harvard. Saer's novel connects the

image of decay with the fall of the Garay family. As the narrative voice remarks in Nadie

nada nunca, "las baterias semienterradas, las cubiertas podridas y manchadas de barro

seco, los tambores de aceite acanalados y oxidados, que eran los vestigios del periodo

fasto de la familia Garay, de la epoca anterior a la muerte de Garay padre;—anterior a la

partida de Pich6n~en la que todavia podian darse el lujo de un automovil" (Saer 160). In

Simon's work the formerly respected family name of the de Reixach's has fallen into

disrepute. In all three cases the family can be connected to a region more than a nation;

the decline and marginalization of the southern United States through Faulkner's

Compson family, of southern France in Simon's de Reixach family, and the litoral region

of Argentina in Saer's Garay clan.

Conclusion: Saer and Simon

To connect the work of Saer, Simon and Faulkner is to unify the regions they

represent in their fiction, the litoral region of Argentina, southern France and the US

south, in a way that demonstrates how "the world republic of letters," to use Pascale

Casanova's phrase, defies both national and continental boundaries. We can read Simon

and Saer as projects that try to absorb and incorporate the enormous innovations of

189
Faulkner in a creative fashion, such that "the Faulknerian revolution," (Casanova)

extends not only south to Argentina, but also across the Atlantic to southern France.

Clearly the most "faulknerian" of the nouveaux romanciers, Simon provides a model for

Saer of how the southern giant's work could be encountered and deployed actively rather

than simply imitated. Looking at his connection to the work of Simon also creates a fresh

angle from which to examine the link between Saer and Faulkner.

Yet, while Faulkner is clearly a key predecessor for Saer and Simon, the

connections between them can still be considered on their own terms, removing Faulkner

from the equation. Faulkner lived from 1897-1962 and won the Nobel prize in 1949,

Saer lived from 1937-2005 and Simon from 1913-2005 and won the Nobel prize in 1985;

Faulkner was essentially a writer from the first part of the twentieth century, during the

height of Anglo-American modernism, while Saer and Simon come of age at a slightly

later moment. As much as they share with Faulkner and Anglo-American modernism,

the work of Simon and Saer reflect their emergence at a different stage in literary history

than him. Set in peripheral spaces that connect characters and storylines from novel to

novel, both Saer and Simon make particular use of the fragment as a device that captures

the faultiness of memory and perception. Even if Faulkner's narratives restructure the

chronological order of their events, famously having a beginning, middle and end, but not

necessarily in that order,15 the novels of Saer and Simon depend more on form and

language, sometimes dispensing altogether with narrative structure. Compared to

Faulkner, the novels of Simon and Saer are less plot driven, and more dependent on small

moments, descriptions of objects, and dense, enigmatic prose.

See Saer "El mundo transfigurado."

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 The argument that for Saer the work of Simon represents a way to reckon with the

Faulknerian project by combining it creatively with elementsfromthe nouveau roman is

convincing. However, Simon's project is especially audacious since it is anchored in a

region of France that did not already have as clearly identifiable and distinguishable of an

identity as Faulkner's south, nor nearly as rich of a regional literary history. For a French

novelist to try to establish a literary universe in an area of France that was not Paris

during the second half of the twentieth century was a particularly bold and subversive

undertaking. One could argue that the hegemony of Buenos Aires in Argentina is

comparable to the sway of Paris in France; both are nations where economic, political

and cultural power are largely centered in the respective capitals, to a greater degree than

any single city in the United States, where authority is more widely distributed. From

this perspective, Simon's use of the south of France centered in Perpignan represents a

model that would have been even more germane to Saer's own case than was Faulkner's

paradigm. Saer takes Simon's basic model of a literary universe set in a rural and

marginalized space, but integrates it with a highly self-reflexive focus on the act of

writing and crisp prose to create a project that makes a definitive break from Faulkner,

and ultimately succeeds in the daunting task of creating fiction that liberates itself from

the long shadow of the southern master.

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 Chapter Six: Conclusion
Saer reads the nouveau roman and the history of its reception as emblematic of

the avant-garde in general. Insofar as he sees himself also as an avant-garde writer, his

interpretation of the nouveau roman might also be seen as a reading of the trajectory of

the reception of his own work; like them his work had been slow to receive recognition.

The nouveau roman writers were initially greeted with controversy and resistance in

French letters and have even been blamed by some for the perceived downturn in prestige

worldwide of French literature.1 For Saer the same fate had befallen the most interesting

writersfromLatin America: "Es inutil decir que los grandes escritores latinoamericanos

del siglo XX—Ruben Dario, Cesar Vallejo, Macedonio Fernandez, Vicente Huidobro, el

Neruda de los afios treinta y cuarenta, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan L. Ortiz, Felisberto

Hernandez, etc—son en su mayoria casi desconocidos en Europa y mal leidos en su

propio continente" (Saer 266). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the nouveau

roman was long considered to be dead; however Saer argues that its vigor continues.

Implicit in his thinking is a hierarchy between writers who have been accorded a central

place in the literary world and those that have been relegated to the margins; Saer inverts

the conventional understanding by viewing those from the periphery, which he associates

with the avant-garde, as the creators of the more rigorous and enduring art forms.

Saer scholars frequently mention the influence of the nouveau roman on his work,

but emphasize its limitations. In her valuable overview of Saer, Romano remarks that

"from Unidad de lugar to Nobody Nothing Never Saer's style presents coincidences with
1
See Saer "La doble longevidad del narrador Robbe-Grillet" p. 116.
2
See Saer "La novela" p. 121.

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objectivism, a movement initiated in France in the mid-1950's" (Romano 523). For

Romano this is the third in what she sees as four stages in his writing; in other words she

views the impact of the connection with the nouveau roman as limited to his writings

between 1967 and 1980. Yet his dialogue with the movement in his writings both

predates and postdates the period she posits. Even if the connections are not as apparent

on the level of his style, they remain a formative part of his fundamental approach to

literature, informing his take on the relationship between literature and society,

representation, and humanism. Written around a time that marks the fiftieth anniversary

of the outset of the nouveau roman, Saer's essay "La doble longevidad del narrador

Robbe-Grillet" is a statement about the persistent relevance of Robbe-Grillet's fiction—

and by extension of the nouveau roman as a whole—though it can also be read as a

statement about Saer's continued interest in these writers, which repudiates the notion

that his link to them was restricted to his earliest writings. The fact that his involvement

with them was lifelong, proven by the late publication of his essay defending Robbe-

Grillet, testifies to the importance their writings held for him, not only literally in terms

of his actual engagement with them, but also symbolically in terms of his signaling an

alliance with them, as if in defiance of their detractors and as representative of his

broader sympathy with the whole avant-garde tradition.

While we should not overstate his connection to the nouveau roman, we should

not understate it either. With this in mind I have tried to demonstrate the richness of

Saer's intertextual approach. I hope thereby to have enriched Saer scholarship by

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showing the depth of his connections with the nouveau roman and scholarship on the

nouveau roman by providing new material on its impact on Argentinian literature.

Future studies of the relationship between Saer and the nouveau roman might

look at the relevance of the work of Robert Pinget and Claude Oilier—two figures

associated with the movement who I have excluded here—for his oeuvre. Furthermore,

while I have considered the theory of Jean Ricardou, examination of the link between his

fiction and Saer's work would also be beneficial. Additional consideration of the

reception of the nouveau roman in Latin America, and especially in Argentina, would

also further supplement the work I have done here. Finally, some examination of how

Saer has been received in France, and in particular how he might have been read by the

nouveau roman writers themselves, would be valuable contributions to Saer studies.

The nouveau roman not only theorizes and provides a direction for how the novel

could reinvent itself, but also presents a model for how it could enter into conversation

with the very visual disciplines that were increasingly placing its very existence in

jeopardy. Saer's interest in the relationship between the novel and other disciplines is

everywhere in evidence in his work and attested to further by the fact that he originally

went to France on a scholarship to study the relationship between the novel and film

(Romano). From Robbe-Grillet's work with film to the incorporation of references to

paintings in Sarraute and Simon, the role of visual elements in the work of the nouveaux

romanciers is one of the principal characteristics that Saer finds attractive in them.

Following in this path, Saer employs discussions of films, paintings and

photographs throughout his work, thus expanding the possibilities of the novel. Where

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other post-Boom writersfromthe southern cone, like Manuel Puig, incorporated

references to popular films in their writing, Saer instead invokes the interpretations

viewers have of afilm,as in one key passage in Glosa. In other cases, as in "La mayor,"

he emphasizes the subject-object relationship established through the use of a camera.

His references to painting, as in Lo imborrable, become a site where he contrasts an

aesthetic based on a theory of verisimilitude with an approach that views art as creating

independent worlds of its own.

Saer's renderings of the texts by Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute from French into

Spanish, which have been almost entirely ignored in the criticism, demonstrate how

translation is a privileged site where he engages with the nouveau roman writings and

uses them to develop ideas and techniques that he would incorporate into his own fiction.

As I have shown, he employs elements from his version of Robbe-Grillet's "La plage" in

his novel Nadie nada nunca, and draws on Sarraute's Tropisms for a number of ideas that

are central in his "La mayor." While Saer was not as active of a translator as Borges,

consideration of his activity as a translator helps to broaden our sense of the reach and

intricacy of his creative process. His interest in translation goes hand in hand with his

fascination with writing as a physical and intimate act defined by the specificity of

individual words and the ongoing dialogue between text, reader and writer.

The attention to language that informs Saer's interest in translation also emerges

in the staging throughout hisfictionof the process of writing and his attention to

textuality. From his use of texts within texts to writer-characters to discussions of literary

matters, hisfictionis fascinated with literature and the act of writing. In Saer's fiction

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writing is always a problematic undertaking—authorship of texts is in doubt, multiple

interpretations of works are put forth, the authenticity of a text is indeterminable, the line

between reader and text is blurry. This self-reflexive quality is another point that he has

in common with the nouveaux romanciers; in short writing about writing is central to

both Saer and the nouveaux romanciers. The self-referential dimension of their fiction is

perhaps the single most distinguishing characteristic of the nouveau roman; or, to put the

point another way, the nouveau roman is the site of some of the most radically self-

reflexive writing in twentieth century literature. In chapter three I traced the convergence

between Saer and Sarraute regarding the question of the writer in society, showing how

both critique conventional forms of literary interpretation, whether the use of a criterion

of verisimilitude in Saer's Lo imborrable, or the use of biographical information about

the author as an evaluative device, as in Sarraute's Entre la vie et la mort and Les fruits

d'or. This is one case where Saer and a nouveau roman writer set their particular

concerns with writing in a broader context that highlights the reception of texts, drawing

attention to the importance of interpretation.

In one form or another Saer and the five nouveau roman writers I have discussed

here are all concerned with the impact that a text has on the reader, in a way that goes

beyond the concern that any author might have about this matter. Their project of

attacking realism goes hand in hand with their search for forms of writing that require

new ways of reading. From Robbe-Grillet's descriptions of objects to Sarraute's striking

juxtapositions to Saer's open-ended narratives built on a principle of uncertainty, all of

the writers I have considered here force the reader to engage with their texts in

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unprecedented ways. If they don't oblige him to co-write the novels, as Barthes would

have it, they thrust him out of his complacency, compel him to adapt his reading patterns

to their texts and to rethink the very meaning of reading.

One of the key ways that Saer and the nouveaux romanciers challenge the reader

is through the use of fragmentation and a focus on the particular, which functions in turn

as a critique of the totalizing meta-narrative. Robbe-Grillet's use of insect imagery and

Sarraute's concept of the tropism are two prime examples of these types of references

from the nouveau roman that Saer leverages to build a literary universe rooted in the

microscopic and small, apparently mundane moments in daily life.

Saer's fascination with the small and particular is consistent with his use of a

literary universe with interconnected novels based in a single fictional location. This

model, which as I have shown links his work with Simon and Faulkner, in Latin

American literature in the twentieth century is synonymous with Garcia Marquez's

Macondo probably more than any other writer. But whereas Macondo can be read as a

microcosm for Colombia or even Latin America, Saer's literary world is clearly not

allegorical or representative; instead, it is a precise and localized portrait of a particular

town and the surrounding area, including the geography, the weather and the way people

speak. Yet Saer also consciously breaks from the costumbrista tradition in Latin

American literature that was a form of realism concentrating on local color and traditions.

Many Saer scholars suggest that he undergoes a shift from the more enigmatic

prose of the early novels to a more accessible style. Saer himself might accept this view,

but his essays show an especially strong desire to see his body of work as unified and

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consistent in its pursuit of a singular aesthetic. The objective of unity is also evident in

his view of space—think of the title of his short story collection Unidadde lugar (1967)--

and strategy of linking novels through the repetition of characters and recurrence to the

litoral/Santa Fe region as a setting. However, Saer's concept of unity is an aesthetic

principle rather than a facile celebration of the erosion of difference. He holds up the

nouveau roman as if to show both that its authors continue to write in the service of their

original principles, and that he, in defending them and inscribing himself in their

tradition, has remained faithful to his own principles.

In the introductory chapter I discussed Saer in relationship to the novels of the

Boom in Latin American literature, but given that the bulk of his writing was produced

between 1970-2005, after the Boom, we can also consider him in a post-Boom context.

If one of the key distinguishing factors of post-Boom writing is the collapse of the

boundary between high and popular culture, then Saer's work diverges from it by

focusing on questions of language and place, and regarding popular culture as a threat to

literature rather than a source of creative inspiration: "la cultura de masas, industria y

estimulo del fantaseo, es el enemigo mortal de la literatura" (Saer 210). Saer's harsh

criticism of Manuel Puig, perhaps the standard bearer of post-Boom writing in Argentina

for his incorporation of references to film and popular culture into novels that are

artistically and narratively complex, reflects this stance: "£a traicion de Rita Hayworth,

del argentino Manuel Puig, es una novela que, no obstante proponerse como tema la

fascinacion del cine en las clases medias, aparece anacronica porque el tema de la

modernidad esta tratado desde fuera, con una sensibilidad costumbrista" (Saer 196).

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While he does not explain what for him constitutes Puig's treatment of a theme from

outside rather than inside and while the description of Puig's writing as costumbrista

seems extreme, his basic position—criticizing the combination of high and popular

culture-is clear. Against the post-Boom trend, Saer unapologetically preserves a high

modernist sensibility of what counts as literature.

This position runs throughout his writing, from the concept of "verdadera

literatura" in "Literatura y crisis argentina" to the parody of the fictitious novel "La brisa

en el trigo" by the fictitious writer Walter Bueno for its commercial success in Lo

imborrable. The problem is not so much that he associates this type of literature with

authoritarianism as that he is fundamentally distrustful of art that is commercially

successful. While this position may seem anachronistic because it recalls the stance of

high modernism, Saer held to it throughout his writings. Its corollary, that a lack of

commercial success is a sign of aesthetic value, is a claim Saer's critical essays make

implicitly.

The eclectic and diverse nature of literary production during the post-Boom defies

pat categories, but in Argentinian letters Saer can be more productively situated along

with fellow novelists Ricardo Piglia and Cesar Aira. Together these three major figures

are the most canonized practitioners of the post-Boom novel in Argentina, while creating

dense and rigorous novels that require intense concentration and challenge reader and

marketplace. Like Piglia and Aira, Saer's novels draw on the detective genre and

reframe the relationship between literature and history, especially through recurrence to

the nineteenth century, when the course that Argentina would take as a nation took shape.

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In the Cono Sur more broadly Saer can be contextualized with Roberto Bolano, Diamela

Eltit, and Cristina Peri Rossi because of their linguistic rigor, experimentation with form,

polemical dimension and search for innovative angles to explore the legacy of military

dictatorships.

In the course of my analysis I hope to have demonstrated that the nouveaux

romanciers provide a theoretical language and framework for the critique of realism that

was a fundamental part of Saer's literary project in Argentina. While he chose not to

adopt all of their techniques, he shared their basic convictions regarding the state of prose

fiction and the direction it should take. They articulated ideas that he and other

Argentinian writers had come to on their own. Seeing that a group of writers an ocean

and a continent away had arrived independently at the same conclusions as they

corroborated their literary insights.

The notion that there was a shared pattern in the history of the novel in a

prosperous western European nation and a developing onefromthe southern cone

provided evidence for Saer of a universal pattern of literary trends, one that transcends

national differences, in a way that illustrates Casanova's basic argument. While other

Latin American writers tended to see the nouveau roman as an elitist, European literary

movement, Saer argued for continuity: rather than constituting a foreign source of literary

neo-colonization, the nouveau roman was part of the same broad world literary tradition.

Saer's effort to create a link with them was not a rejection of his own literary heritage; it

was part of his deliberate attack on nationalism and the idea of national literatures. Saer's

recuperation of the nouveau roman certainly stemsfromhis admiration of its writers, but

200
it is also a conscious affront to the category of national literature, especially since the

novel as a genre is often associated with the idea of the nation.

Saer's anti-national approach to literature was especially informed by two

Argentinian writers, Borges and Macedonio Fernandez,3 both of whom provided a

precedent for the stance in the Argentinian literary tradition. Saer follows the ideas

Borges expressed in two of his most influential essays, "El escritor argentino y la

tradicidn" and "Kafka y sus precursores." In the former Borges argues against the idea,

proposed by Leopoldo Lugones in Elpayador (1916), that Martin Fierro (1872,1879) is

the canonical text of Argentinian literature and that Argentinian writers have an

obligation to write about certain national themes. He asserts that the tradition of the

Argentinian writer is "all of western culture" (Borges 184). Saer walks in Borges's

footsteps when he uses the nouveau roman as protest against the notion that the

Argentinian writer is obliged to treat Argentinian themes and employ Argentinian literary

techniques. He follows the similarly subversive and liberating gesture in "Kafka y sus

precursores," where Borges argues that "every writer creates his own precursors. His

work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future" (Borges 201).

Saer frames the nouveau roman as the inheritor of the legacy of Anglo-American

modernism. Moreover, while he claims certain Argentinian writers—such as Macedonio

Fernandez and Borges— as his precursors, he also looks to numerous non-Argentinian

and non-Hispanic writers, such as the nouveaux romanciers and Robert Musil.

3
See Bermudez Martinez for a more detailed discussion of the relationship between Saer and Borges and
Fernandez.

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 Macedonio Fernandez's Museo de la novela de la eterna provides a model for

Saer's belief in the value of a fragmentary novel that frustrates the reader's expectations.

The figure of Fernandez was also a key point of reference for the mysterious writer figure

of Morelli in Julio Cortazar's Rayuela; Morelli becomes a hero for Horacio Oliveira and

Traveler, and his meditations on literature constitute the "capftulos prescindibles" in the

novel. In "La selva espesa de lo real" Saer states "adhiero plenamente a las posiciones de

Macedonio Fernandez y pienso que su Museo de la novela de la eterna es un momento

teorico sin precedentes en la literatura de lengua espafiola" (Saer 260). Saer invokes

Fernandez to give authority to the statement that he writes to express himself as a writer

as such, not merely as an Argentinian writer: "no hablo como argentino sino como

escritor" (Saer 260).

Saer's novels are at once rooted in a specific location, which he evokes through

language that re-creates the dense rural geography of the litoral region, yet also employ

this locus to create a more universal sense of time and space. Saer repeatedly asserts both

in his fiction and critical essays that place is universal as much as it is specific.4 His

home is thus in literature as much as in the Santa Fe province of Argentina or Paris, the

two places where he lived for the longest periods of time. As much as the tradition of

Argentinian letters, the nouveau roman can be regarded as a kind of literary birthplace for

Saer, one to which he returned repeatedly throughout his life as a writer. By translating

their works and commenting upon their ideas he cut his literary teeth and developed his

own approach to literature; he molded his own vision through these dialogues with them,

4
See Lapesquisa and "Exilio y literatura."

202
which at times were harmonious, while at others contentious, as the polemic with

Ricardou demonstrates. The tense nature of some of these interactions is again consistent

with Casanova's argument that the world republic of letters is marked by competition.

However, far from being a nouveau roman writer himself, Saer used their ideas

and incorporated them into his own literary worldview; rather than being another instance

of a European influence on a Latin American writer, this interconnection is more an

example of Saer's devouring of the nouveau roman, in a cannibalistic gesture consistent

with his own novel El entenado, where he consumes their ideas, digests them and then

integrates them into his own literary approach. He stated that his objective throughout

his writing was to employ ideas that he had picked up from various sources into his own

personalized approach to writing, and this is certainly the case with his use of the

nouveau roman. Thus his work stands as both an homage to them and as an illustration

of how their ideas, even if they didn't always present the new direction for the novel they

had envisioned, provided the source material for one of the most rigorous bodies of

fictional work in twentieth century letters. If European readers expected a Latin

American writer to produce texts defined by magical realism, Saer instead gives them

fiction informed by the disconcerting techniques of the nouveau roman. He challenges

them to read him as a Latin American who is imitating a European literary movement,

knowing this is not the case. Consequently his work obliges them to dispense with their

preconceptions and read his fiction on its own terms, thus opening a space where a more

organic encounter between reader and text is possible.

203
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