Robert Pinget

Pinget, Robert (1919-97). Novelist and playwright. Born in Geneva, he trained as a lawyer, settled in France in 1946, and has devoted himself to writing since 1951.

To win literary fame in modern France one must meet at least one of three criteria: be easily classifiable, engage in public polemic, or publish a succès de scandale. Pinger has met none of these, and the result is that, although often regarded as a principal exponent of the Nouveau Roman, this major writer is far less well known than he ought to be, in spite of a dozen plays and a score of novels or other pieces of extended prose. From the start, with the short pieces that make up Entre Fantoine et Agapa (1951), and in novels like Mahu ou le Matériau (1952), Le Renard et la boussole (1953), and Graal Flibuste (1956), some of the constants of his work are apparent: the pull of place (idealized, intimately known, fantastic, ordinary); the preoccupation with insiders and outsiders; the awareness of the joys and risks of invention. Notable too is the exuberance of the writing. In this early phase, that is sometimes expressed in ways obvious enough: exotic scenes, extravagant utterances. But increasingly Pinget turns away from the extraordinary, to create instead a marvellous quotidian; to find in stones, not sermons only, but skulls, and splendours, and shames. The shift continues through Baga (1958), Le Fiston (1959), and Clope au dossier (1961), and the phase culminates in L'Inquisitoire (1962), in which, by way of the relentless interrogation of an uncomprehending homme à tout faire, the ‘Pinget country’, places and people, is assembled as a huge jigsaw might be.

The novels that follow take this as their ground, but to increasingly different effect. The natural idiom of small rural communities is gossip: endless speculation on whatever is new or unknown, producing stories as plausible as they are unverifiable. But such fabrication, Pinget sees, is exactly what novelists do; and, just as gossip may be malevolent as well as trivial, so narrating may be variously reliable. When, as in his own novels, it is wholly unreliable, exquisitely detailed evocations of scene and custom serve in fact to tantalize; for the intimate domestic patterns of Quelqu'un (1965) can convey cosiness, but also obsession. And in Le Libera (1968), Passacaille (1969), and Fable (1971), it is the space between these that Pinget explores. The tide of talk bears, alongside fragments of the reassuringly familiar, evidence of darker things: sexual and mystical violence. But the tension between the nice and the nasty is never resolved. For Pinget's supreme gift is his rendering of voice: ‘seule capte mon intérêt la voix de celui qui parle’, as he himself put it. The modulations of tone and style, invariably convincing, pull us this way and that, setting local pleasure against general bafflement. And it is more than a display of mimetic talent or a teasing of readers. If there is no solution to his riddles, it is because there is no solver, no voice that distances and situates all the other voices. This is further explored in Cette voix (1975), L'Apocryphe (1980), and L'Ennemi (1987), but its deeper implications appear in an unexpected corner of his work: the texts concerning ‘Monsieur Songe’, an elderly, self-important fusspot who appeared briefly in Graal Flibuste.

In 1982 Pinget revealed that for 20 years he had been writing Monsieur Songe stories as a relaxation from serious writing, and he has carried on: Monsieur Songe (1982), Le Harnais (1984), La Charrue (1985), and Du nerf (1990). And this unserious, and very funny, writing we must take very seriously indeed; for the risibly feeble Monsieur Songe has taken to writing—and become just as likely a model of ‘the writer’ as any the Romantics have bequeathed: pompous, opinionated, and beset intermittently by doubts. How then are we to tell novelists from gossips—or from the subjects of gossip; how to tell profound truth from impromptu invention, or avowable preferences from unconscious desires? For Pinget, we cannot. Writing, language itself, enacts the flow of experience; distinctions like true/false, serious/trivial, or even conscious/unconscious are simply our futile attempts to control it. His novels, at once effortlessly readable and endlessly enigmatic, celebrate the flow itself.

Given his preoccupation with voice, it is not surprising that Pinget has written also for the stage and for radio, with constant echoes from the prose works. These plays are often delightful, but seldom have the charge of the novels. But one early play, La Manivelle (1959), signposts an important connection: it was translated by Samuel Beckett as The Old Tune, and reissued as a parallel text in 1960. Pinget's admiration for Beckett is apparent throughout his work. The other plays are: Lettre morte (1959); Ici ou ailleurs, Architruc, and L'Hypothèse (1961); Autour de Mortin (1965); Identité and Abel et Bela (1971); Paralchimie and Nuit (1973); and Un testament bizarre (1986).

[George Craig]

Bibliography

• M. Praeger, Les Romans de Robert Pinget: une écriture des possibles (1987)