Books: Beware the Blob

A splotch, a blotch,

Be careful of the blob . . .

It creeps and leaps,

And glides and slides across the floor.

Beware of the blob!

This current pop hit perfectly describes the view of man held by a new school of novelistless writers. From Cervantes to Hemingway, storytellers have assumed that man has hopes and aspirations, and that they could be expressed meaningfully. Bosh, says the new school. Man is a blob, creeping and leaping about a world he cannot control, his words meaningless or hypocritical or both. The best thing a novelist can do, the argument runs, is to ditch the novel as it is now known and write a new kind that shows man as the pitiable blob he is. Two new books by two charter members of the blob school:

THE VOYEUR, by Alain Robbe-Grillet (219 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.75), is based on the author’s notion that “the world is neither significant nor absurd. It is. That is the most remarkable thing about it.” Proceeding from this Istentialist view, Author Robbe-Grillet, hero of Europe’s avant-garde critics, has written a sort of whodunit in which the question of whodunit is never answered. To a French offshore island comes Mathias, a watch salesman. Little is told about him, but it is soon plain that he is close to insanity and that his special aberration, like that of Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, involves young girls. As his boat approaches the island, he sees a girl of seven or so on the deck, and in his mind a hallucination forms in which the child becomes a sexual victim.

Mathias stays on the island for three days, and during that time a 13-year-old girl is found bruised and dead at the foot of a seaside cliff. All the evidence points to Mathias, but always there seems the faint chance that his part in the crime is merely a psychopath’s figment.

In a way The Voyeur is a savage but pointless reaction against the psychological novel. Instead of probing the mind, the book nearly ignores it, and concentrates on the exact description of things. In accordance with Author Robbe-Grillet’s belief that objects are more important than people. The island, a barroom, a bedroom, are etched into the reader’s mind, while the story itself and the characters are allowed to go hang. Sooner or later, Robbe-Grillet or one of his disciples is bound to write a novel about a roomful of furniture; the affair between the armchair and the ottoman should be worth waiting for.

THE UNNAMABLE, by Samuel Beckett (179 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.45), carries the blob hero to his logical conclusion: “complete disintegration.” Mahood, the hero-victim of The Unnamable, who early in the book dubs himself Worm, never leaves a large jar. It stands on a pedestal in a street presumably in Paris, just outside a chophouse. He is without arms and legs, and a collar fastened to the lip of the jar fits under his jaw so that he cannot move his head. The restaurant owner’s wife changes the sawdust in the jar now and then, feeds him, and festoons the grisly exhibit with Chinese lanterns. Watching the passing show, Mahood cries endless tears into his beard and tries to answer the questions which are the opening words of the book: “Where now? Who now? When now?”

Author Beckett (Waiting For Godot) himself never answers these questions about his central character. His identity and his past remain obscure—beyond the fact that Mahood’s entire family was killed off by sausage poisoning. But it does not take much imagination to see in Mahood (Manhood?) Author Beckett’s savage symbol for mankind. Beckett’s great strength is to make his readers uneasy. Like all Beckettmen, Mahood echoes the old existentialist plaint that he did not ask to be born and that life’s mess is not of his making. Despairingly he sums up his and Beckett’s arid philosophy: “I’m mute, what do they want, what have I done to them, what have I done to God, what have they done to God, what has God done to us, nothing, and we’ve done nothing to him, you can’t do anything to him, he can’t do anything to us, we’re innocent, he’s innocent, it’s nobody’s fault …”

And yet, the door to an escape from blobdom is left slightly ajar. For while oblivion is the goal, simple consciousness, and life itself, is against it. Mahood’s last cry from his jar of sawdust is: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”