The dispute over the Nouveau Roman

in #steemcleaners5 years ago

The literary movement Nouveau Roman, also known as Objectivism or Antinovel, defends a cinematic narrative; puts the focus on the visual description while avoiding any enunciation referred to the inner world of the characters, as thoughts or feelings.


The Frenchman Robbe-Grillet has always been considered the founder of this movement. However, de Argentine Antonio Di Benedetto has defended having been the first to explore this narrative. Regarding his novel Declination and Angel the author declared: "It is narrated exclusively with visual images —not literary— and sounds. It was conceived so that each action can be photographed or in any case finish explaining itself with the dialogue, the noise of the objects or, simply, the music". (2006: 17) But already before, in stories like "The abandonment and passivity" and "The horse in the salitral", this style is discovered in which the words refer to images as if they were captured by a cinematographic camera.

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Di Benedetto himself in an interview with Soler Serrano mentions a meeting he had with Robbe-Grillet in Berlin in which the Argentine writer claimed the Frenchman to recognize him as the true initiator of this literary current. Then, says Di Benedetto, Robbe-Grillet explained that neither of them was actually the father of Objectivism, but both had written as a reaction to a certain type of literature that rejected and used resources that were everywhere. And he related the following:


There are three people who at the same time have a certain occurrence and write more or less the same: Me, you and a Japanese elevator operator. I run with the advantage of being born in France and of expressing myself in French, a language that as we know has a great cultural influence. You, however, was born in Mendoza, your geographical circumstance made your book take longer to appear and have less diffusion. But think now of our Japanese elevator operator, who sees that his idea has already become obsolete and never published his book.

Surely in this story there is more imagination of Di Benedetto himself than reality, but the anecdote highlights how the geographical, temporal, idomatic and social circumstances can decisively influence the recognition obtained by a literary work.

Spanish version


BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • DI BENEDETTO, A. (2006) Declinación y Ángel, Buenos Aires: Gárgola Ediciones.
  • A FONDO. Interview by Joaquín Soler Serrrano with Antonio Di Benedetto. Available in: YouTube

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