Coming to Grips with the Ineffable...

as my teachers used to call it.

My dislike of "le roman fleuve" has reached delta proportions.

It was so horribly difficult to read the prescribed French writers that were fashionable in the early 1970's that their existence put me off the academic life. Ghastly conversations about Beckett, trips to the theatre to watch the coarse eating of bananas, descriptions of nature which seemed to be a subtle transferences of souls in torment onto the landscape round... it went on and on and on.

Frankly, it went on happily for years, only to be replaced by queer theory and Foucault which would give anybody nightmares, not because of the subject matter, but because, given my limited vocabulary, "literature" seemed to have parted company with language itself.
Too many words...

I don't insist on plain speech and most of us haven't a clue what we're talking about most of the time, which is the human condition. But struggling with the works of those who had been through the crucible of the best academic systems in the world left me scorched and running for cover.

And just in case anybody wonders what caused this outburst, it's in response to Peter Rozovsky's mention of Robbe-Grillet's interest in crime writing. No wonder I took to studying needlecraft patterns during most of my student years.


I once went to hear Natalie Sarrault speak and overall her work was more aceessible than that of the father of the "Nouveau Roman".

However I found it difficult to decipher what she was talking about, even though it sounded wonderful. I think that many writers who came through a world war were so traumatised they wrote in code.

I don't mean to be reductionist by writing this, but it is the excuse I have made up for the existence of the Existentialists and the extremely zealous and esoteric novelists who made life so difficult years ago.