text containing it must be found wanting and rewritten, for there can be no one single hypothesis, only a proliferation of hypotheses. InThe Hypothesis, the curtain rises on Alexander Mortin, pacing about as he revises a paper he is planning to present to an audience. At first, Mortin seems confidently in control both of himself and of the words he strings out in long, somewhat boring sentences, but when he reaches the point in the talk where he brings up the lost manuscript, the play’s tone and structure undergo progressive and disturbing changes. The linear account branches off into a paradigmatic series of variants meant to explain or reconstruct the disappearance. Those variants give rise to other variants concerning Mortin’s family. When Mortin reaches the point at which his story becomes hopelessly lost in contradictions, he stops, goes back, and begins again from the beginning. As he does so, a filmed image of him is projected on a screen at the rear of the stage. As he drones on, it grows larger and more menacing. This filmed Mortin interrupts the actor Mortin with increasing frequency, contradicting, correcting, offering ever more complicated and elaborate hypotheses until the curtain falls on the shattered scrivener, muttering muddled, circular phrases that come to no conclusion.

Pinget’s early work incorporates and acts out a kinetic, highly generative, irrationally poetic approach to word association reminiscent of the Surrealists. His later, somewhat forbidding narratives are the tightly crafted texts of a writer who has found his distinctive voice and means of expression. The novels and plays of Pinget’s second period use intertextual references to call attention to the narrative structures they are making fun of while striking out resolutely in new directions. In these works, Pinget provides plots that are comprehensible (up to a point), quests that develop in a linear fashion before branching out into a bewildering plethora of variants, and language that follows the syntactic patterns of narrational discourse before doubling back on itself in associative spirals. These novels and plays are therefore of particular interest to the general reader inasmuch as they bridge old forms and new. More accessible than Pinget’s initial experiments, they provide useful keys to the vital, often puzzling world of Pinget’s later novels and plays.

Pinget’s later fiction turns even further away from linear narration. The anecdotal fragments are shorter, more frequently interrupted or broken off, and even less causally sequential. As Laurent Jenny has remarked of the New Novel generally, “The book becomes simply a system of variants upon which it is impossible to impose an ’authentic’ version of the story being told.” In the works of this period, Pinget brings his mastery of the techniques of repetition and alternation to bear on words themselves. Themes and images accumulate and come into focus only to be transformed through new associations. That Pinget’s fiction should have evolved in this direction is hardly surprising in the light of his deep and continuing fascination with poetry. Indeed, his later texts come as close to becoming “poèmes en prose” as the New Novel is likely to go.

Although Pinget’s work may appear inaccessible at first, it offers rewards of great interest and value to the patient reader. His novels and plays give a gripping, totally honest, unself-indulgent account of the writer at grips with his exacting craft, and the oscillation between old forms and new in Pinget’s works makes them an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the theory and practice of French fiction since the 1950’s.

The definitive study of the relationships between the practices and techniques of the New Novelists since the 1950’s, on the one hand, and the numerous new critical approaches to literature that developed in France in the 1960’s and 1970’s, on the other hand, has yet to be attempted. Considerable light was shed on this fascinating subject in a 1984 National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at Princeton University, “Modern Criticism and Narration,” directed by Professor François Rigolot. Suffice it to say, however, that to the reader intrigued by Pinget’s narrative strategies, many of these critical approaches yield helpful insights. The converse is also true. Many of Pinget’s texts may be considered as forming a fruitful field of study for such diverse approaches to fiction as structural analysis, textuality, audience-oriented criticism, and deconstruction.

Finally, Pinget’s quest is worthwhile in its own right. To be sure, the theme of incompletion and the impossibility of communication are depressing, and the steadfast refusal to accept any fixed form is daunting, but humor never abandons Pinget even at his most despairing moments. Humor presupposes a belief in the Divine, which, in turn, presupposes the possibility of transcendence. The letter may never be sent, the manuscript may never be completed, but somehow in these texts that doubt themselves, in these words that question themselves and one another and in so doing generate more words, new words, there is faintly audible the “puny inexhaustible voice still talking” to which William Faulkner alluded in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. As in Faulkner’s work, although in a different register altogether, one finds in Pinget’s fiction the profound hope and conviction, against all rational explanation or justification, that the speaking voice and the writing hand will not merely survive but will prevail.

Pinget’s first fictional work, Between Fantoine and Agapa, was remarkably prescient. Many of its goals andnarrative strategies would be taken up later by the New Novelists. Pinget describes this quietly subversive work in a preface written for Barbara Wright’s English translation in 1982 as follows: This little book is the first I wrote in prose. I had written a number of poems in my youth and I was still very much under the influence of the surrealists, of attempts to approach the unconscious; in short, of experiments made on language in what might be called its nascent state, that’s to say: independent of any rational order. A gratuitous game with the vocabulary—that was my passion. Logic seemed to me to be incapable of attaining the very special domain of literature, which in any case I still equate with that of poetry. And so it was a fascination with the possibilities, the absolute freedom of creation, an intense desire to abolish all the constraints of classical writing, that made me produce these exercises.

The collection of stories takes the reader haphazardly through some twenty flights of fancy and concludes with a voyage journal reminiscent of the most freely associative pages of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. Pinget delights in playing off literal and figurative expressions, levels of language, cliché, and neologism. Figures of speech become characters; inanimate objects come to life. The formation of sentences results from unexpected and revivifying substitutions and juxtapositions. Through all of this, Pinget taps the vital infralanguage of speech, which refuses to be limited or bound by the normative rules and syntax characteristic of the written. As a result, the prose of Pinget’s first book seems at the same time commonplace and bizarre: I spent my childhood in soap boxes. My father was a film-maker, my mother a glass blower at Murano. She had left me with my grandmother, who lived in a garret. This good old woman was a bit of a bat. I kept in a casket the membrane that joined her arms to her ribs: they’re like parchment today.Our everyday fare at the time consisted of bits of plaster and raw rabbits.

Looking back at his first book, Pinget saw in it “all the forms in embryo taken by my later work.” In terms of the three common threads mentioned above, it is obvious that Pinget took up such Surrealistic verbal exercises as automatic writing and free association in order to liberate his style from what he terms “the prisons of rationalizing reason.” It is equally obvious, however, that the resulting flow of words has been edited and ordered to some degree by the conscious mind. Characteristically, then, from the very beginning, Pinget appropriates a preexisting stylistic approach, modifies it, and makes it his own.

Like his favorite author, Miguel de Cervantes, who used the process of parody to give expression to his vision of life, Pinget pokes fun at the reader’s expectations of what a narrative should be and do. As in Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), the act of writing becomes the book’s subject and object, and the reader is invited into a world whose contours are softened and blurred by a gentle, inventive whimsy.

The Inquisitory

In the novels of his second period, Pinget uses the presuppositions and formulaic repetitiveness of the mystery story as comic foils. His distortion of the detective story becomes a reductio ad absurdum of the narrative strategies and conventions underpinning the “old novel”—its reliance on predictable psychology, linear plot, an omniscient author, an inevitable denouement, and consequential development. In The Inquisitory, Pinget taps the intertextual energies of parody as a generative principle, not only in terms of literary genres in the broadest sense but also in his treatment of the informational building blocks that move the récit along from one point to the next. The reader of Pinget’s previous works may have noted in passing the repetition of familiar names and occurrences. In The Inquisitory, the phenomenon of recurrence takes on truly epic proportions. In its four-hundred-odd pages, almost all of the persons, places, and events mentioned in previous works recur, as in the cynical novels of Honoré de Balzac andÉmile Zola. In Pinget’s hands, however, recurring material reappears with a difference. Instead of coming into sharper and sharper focus, as it does in the novels of the nineteenth century, Pinget’s cross-references to his own work become more and more blurred each time they appear, challenging, disrupting, and sabotaging the novel’s linear development by generating new, alternative interpretations.

The Inquisitory begins with the cautionary phrase “Yes or no answer” and is cast in the form of dialogue from the first page to the last. The interlocutors in this often-belligerent verbal exchange appear to be a half-deaf, retired manservant and an investigator or inquisitor of some kind. With dogged persistence, the questioner attempts to ferret out some scandal or other to which the servant may have been privy during his long years of service to the chatelains of the local château—hence the neologism of the title. The old man responds to the questions with apparent goodwill, but the reader soon senses a certain reticence on his part to let slip any potentially scandalous revelations.

Moreover, whenever the questions seem to be about to narrow in on unsavory and satisfactorily conclusive revelations, the old man’s answers trail off into interminable lists, endless anecdotes, topographical descriptions, and truncated reminiscences. The linguistic presupposition on which the pursuer in this verbal game of hide-and-seek (or deafman’s buff) relies heavily is that the Socratic dialogue will eventually arrive at a single, all-encompassing truth. If this simplistic formulation were true, the narrative would unfold like a Chinese box. The hermeneutic process would inexorably produce a kernel of irreducible truth. In fact, it does not. Instead, the process of question and answer wheels about in long arabesques and ellipses, ending inconsequentially with the old man’s refusal to continue.

Beckett would hardly have praised The Inquisitory as “one of the most important novels since the War,” however, if it were simply the account of a garbled investigation that goes nowhere. In fact, that cautionary initial phrase, “Yes or no answer,” sets in motion a far more interesting subdialogue maintained throughout the book, the novelist’s interior monologue as he sits down at the typewriter and tries to summon his imaginary world from the void. Considered from this perspective, the novel opens into a simultaneous dialogue on three levels. The interrogator questions the old man, the author cudgels his brain to provide material to fill in the outlines of his imaginary province, and Pinget tacitly invites the reader to be present at the creation of the text. The manuscript pages of The Inquisitory illustrate the ebb and flow of the process in visible terms as their margins are crammed with floor plans, maps, sketches of furniture, and doodles as well as the usual cross-outs and emendations.

Determining what actually “happened” at the castle becomes completely unimportant and irrelevant (as well as downright impossible). Instead, Pinget shows to what degree the elements that make up the novel function as paradigmatic, indeterminate series. What appear to be “factual” elements of the story can be related to one another and expressed only approximately or relatively. By programming the paradigmatic elements that undercut the validity of the narrative’s linear progression along the syntagmatic axis that moves the text from one anecdotal fragment to another, Pinget causes the novel to produce the reversed, mirror image of a novel as it moves along. As Denis Diderot had done earlier, in Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, 1797), another narrative in question-and-answer form, Pinget effectively defies the reader’s expectation of what a novel “should” be by querying implicitly, How can you challenge the novel without writing a novel? It is not surprising, then, that in The Inquisitory a thing can be itself and the contrary of itself at the same time. Truly, the search for meaning has made its way into the text at all levels—and with a vengeance.

This systematic frustration of the desire for clarity and definition irritates and troubles the reader, yet few novels capture the agony of the writer facing the blank page as compellingly, and the book’s spiral development generates a manic, comic energy. The approximative nature of everything else in The Inquisitory spills over into its language, often with extremely amusing results. Because the retired servant is quite deaf, his reception and retransmission of words and phrases (particularly those of foreign derivation) are frequently garbled, resulting in numerous barbarisms, spoonerisms, and malapropisms: “kleptomane” for “clergyman,” “tripe-tease” for “striptease,” “Ross Royce” for “Rolls-Royce.” In this absorbing novel, language generates itself through a process of translingual inversion, and the “incorrect” transcriptions of words and phrases are often more poetically expressive than the clichés that brought them into being.

The Libera Me Domine

In The Libera Me Domine, Pinget once again delves into an aspect of the human voice that fascinates him, that of gossip. The novel is set in a small French village. Very little actually happens in the narrative; the intrigue is rather a recounting of the various accounts of events as they are retold by the narrator, who plays a double role—as a villager retelling tales and addressing the reader as a person who is an insider in the village’s activity. He often refers to “you know who” and “you know where” rather than mentioning the names of people and places, and thus creates an ambiance of sharing secrets and of complicity with the reader. It is a false relationship, however, because the reader does not know the stories about which the villagers gossip.

The narrator is also the author, with all of the author’s privileges and dilemmas. He constantly begins the various stories he is telling and then changes the facts, such that he is writing the novel as the reader is reading it. The reader, however, is denied any creative part in the writing of the novel, being limited to the role of an observer listening to the author’s thoughts as he develops the work. Pinget further confuses and disorients the reader/observer by sliding from one past happening to another without any transition.

Pinget breaks the novel form as he denies his narrative any chronological form and any actual fictional plot. The narrative is a compilation of gossip. Pinget uses the ever-changing nature of gossip—which is embellished, deformed, and sensationalized as it is repeated—to create a continuous undercurrent of danger, decay, and death. There are allusions to a boy who was murdered in the woods, to a drunken truck driver who has run someone over, and to the dangers that lurk—especially for children—behind each bush and in every deserted place.

The novel is an excellent example of Pinget’s preoccupation not only with voice but also with tone. The repetition of words, names, phrases, and stories, coupled with the rhythmic nature of the prose, re-creates the musical tone of religious chant, especially that of the requiem. Hence the title The Libera Me Domine (Deliver me O Lord), the phrase from the requiem or funeral mass that is repeated in the final scenes of the funeral.

That Voice

In That Voice, one of Pinget’s most resonant and structurally complex texts, a voice localizes itself as “that voice.” That voice speaks about and mimics many things: women’s gossip over groceries in a country store, words that appear and disappear on a slate, Mortin’s last days, the passage of the seasons, the disposition of shops in a small town, a murder that might have been a suicide, the writing of wills, the disappearance of papers, the posthumous validation of a manuscript. In the original French text, there was no punctuation in this flow of prose from fragment to fragment save a period at the end of each paragraph, but Pinget consented to the placement of commas in Barbara Wright’s English translation. In both versions, however, the narrative’s guiding structural principle relies on fade-outs and cuts as one subject dovetails into another or is abruptly interrupted. Toward the middle of the book, Pinget returns to the subjects of his narrative fragments in reverse order, like someone trying to go further and further back in an effort to remember. Pinget’s working title for this book was “Amnesis.” The word’s literal meaning is “the recalling to memory of things past”; in the context of psychoanalysis it refers to “a patient’s remembrance of the early stages of his illness.”

The “illness” at issue here is the quest in Between Fantoine and Agapa. Pinget attempts to use words to find meaning and transcendence in the confusion and contradictions of daily life and to share the joy and anguish of that attempt as closely as possible with the reader. Viewed from the perspective of linear development, the narrative fails, since by doubling back it “deconstructs” itself into the silence from which it originated. In the supralogical poetic context in which the text is written, however, Pinget succeeds in suggesting a transcendence (life-in-death, the cycle of the seasons, the birth of a new voice from old words) that validates his work. The new law. A window open onto the night. Crescent moon, July on the wane, the harvest will soon be at an end. A different voice, but all of a sudden, like a dew, the love of what has been said. . . . A new law requires a new fable, let’s wait until it takes shape with the passing days. . . . All regrets stifled, task accepted, to recompose as a defense against anguish, no matter where it may come from, that unforgotten dream, then finally leave it far behindfor fear of never dying.

Traces of Ink

Traces of Ink, written shortly before Pinget’s death, is the last of the notebooks of Monsieur Songe; it is also Pinget’s last commentary on the act of writing and on himself as a writer. Monsieur Songe was Pinget’s alter ego. Through this character, Pinget recorded his own autobiography or portrait imbued with a humorous tone. Presented as a collection of random thoughts, Monsieur Songe/Pinget’s self-doubts, concerns about the importance of writing, and preoccupation with death are reiterated, as are Monsieur Songe/Pinget’s never-ending fascination with words and his faith in writing that flows from a free play of the unconscious.