At one point of Nathalie Sarraute’s novel Les Fruits d’Or two Parisian intellectuals are discussing the book:
‘To my mind, what causes the—“prodigious” is not too strong a word—the prodigious beauty of this book—and this is why no one passage of it can be taken in isolation—is that it constitutes an experience to my knowledge unique. . . . This book, I believe, establishes in literature a privileged language which succeeds in outlining an analogy which is its very structure. It is an absolutely new and perfect appropriation of rhythmic signs which transcend by their tension what is inessential in every system of semantics. That inessential quality which you have been describing so accurately, dear friend.’ The other, facing him, suffers a brief contorsion, as if ruffled by a sudden gust of wind, then quickly grows calm again, and slowly nods his head: ‘Yes. Of course. It has an élan which abolishes the invisible by grounding it in the ambiguity of the signified.’
Nonsense is usually funny, I suppose, and not often dangerous. It only becomes so when it is erected into unassailable dogma by its adherents, and is then acclaimed by a public who think that what is mystifying must ipso facto be deserving of worship. The ideas of the Tel Quel group are, I am glad to see, being challenged in France itself. I should like to add my voice to that of the challengers—and to Roger Poole’s perceptive remarks in Twentieth Century Studies, May, 1970—and try to explore (as coolly as possible) what seems to me to be the centre of the Tel Quel position, namely its views on the relation between literature and experience. Besides, the exercise may have its own value, in clarifying some of the issues concerned in this perennial problem—though I cannot of course hope to resolve any of them.