“Office at night”: A ficción by Dean Kyte. The tracks below are best heard through earphones.

The year 2024 has been a landmark literary year for your Melbourne Flâneur.

Among the many achievements, after four years of patient plotting, planning, and pre-production, a formal commencement was made on production of the forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast, an offshoot of The Spleen of Melbourne project which began to manifest itself during the epic Coronavirus lockdown of 2020.

“Office at night”, track 11 on The Spleen of Melbourne audiobook, was written while your Melbourne Flâneur was dodging the CV all over NSW in the winter of 2021. It is one of eight ‘experimental previews’ for the podcast I wrote, recorded, and sound-designed during the years of pre-production as I got a progressively firmer handle on both the literary and the auditory ‘style’ I am going for in the podcast.

I’m calling that style (at least in its auditory aspect) ‘audio noir’—although such a term is not the best French.

But I believe that I have found in the soundscapes cobbled together from the more than 400 recordings I have made all over Melbourne, Victoria, and points even further afield in the last two years, an auditory approximation of the pseudo-documentary style of post-war film noir, adapted, in its turn, from the pseudo-documentary principles of Italian neorealismo.

The ‘Italian connection’, the conceptual influence of a ‘new realism’ in cinema, derived from the documentary, on the fictional audio project that has emerged as a sub-project of the prose poems on The Spleen of Melbourne album, is a key theoretic base in my thinking, for in its literary dimension, as narrated texts intoned over these cinematic soundscapes, the style I have developed for The Melbourne Flâneur podcast has its ‘French connection’ too:—the post-war Nouveau Roman.

Over the past fifteen months, I’ve been taking you, book by book, through the work of the novelist who—along with my dear, adored Henry James—has shared with the Master co-regency as the chief stylistic influence on the podcast.

His theoretic principles ‘towards a new novel’ I have applied in experimental previews such as “Office at night”, and have eventually mastered and perfected as, in 2024, I wrote the first four canonical episodes of this dark documentary on contemporary Melbourne life, of which “Office at night” is an ‘interstitial episode’, taking place halfway through the series.

In 1963, the novelist in question, Alain Robbe-Grillet, was at the height of his international celebrity and his influence on Western culture.

In the ten years to that date, from the incomprehension that greeted his first published novel, Les Gommes (1953), Robbe-Grillet had quickly taken the citadel of French literature, going from dismissed madman to dean and spokesman for a diverse school of avant-garde French writers, many of whom were, like Robbe-Grillet himself, published by Les Éditions de Minuit.

The literary press of Paris, for want of a better term, said that the Minuit school of novelists were engaged in the project of writing a ‘nouveau roman’—a ‘new novel’—and the term, pejorative at first, signalling a definite break with the pre-war tradition of the French psychological novel that had come down from Balzac, stuck to the group.

Robbe-Grillet seemed the most iconoclastic of the Nouveaux Romanciers to the critics—and he was also the most charismatic, the most good-humoured in taking and batting back broadsides, and the most gregarious, showing a generosity towards the work of his fellow novelists exceedingly rare in a writer, taking their part and arguing the collective case of the group.

This movement from margins to mainstream-adjacent put Robbe-Grillet in a powerful personal position, both in French letters and, as the cachet of being a cutting-edge French novelist has a profound modishness for the Anglosphere, eventually globally. It led Robbe-Grillet to pen a mystifying screenplay for Alain Resnais in 1961 and, in 1962, to make his début as a filmmaker, becoming one of the few novelists in history to have a second career as a film director.

Robbe-Grillet’s coup was accompanied by the publication in the French press of a small corpus of articles in which he tentatively put forth the case for a new kind of novel that diverged radically from the French tradition and was adapted to the actual conditions of post-war life.

In 1963, with his star at its apogee, Robbe-Grillet collected these essays in a single volume, which he published under the title Pour un nouveau roman (For a New Novel).

Ces textes ne constituent en rien une théorie du roman ; ils tentent seulement de dégager quelques lignes d’évolution qui me paraissent capitales dans la littérature contemporaine. Si j’emploie volontiers, dans bien des pages, le terme de Nouveau Roman, ce n’est pas pour désigner une école, ni même un groupe défini et constitué d’écrivains qui travailleraient dans le même sens ; il n’y a là qu’une appellation commode englobant tous ceux qui cherchent de nouvelles formes romanesques, capables d’exprimer (ou de créer) de nouvelles relations entre l’homme et le monde, tous ceux qui sont décidés à inventer le roman, c’est-à-dire à inventer l’homme. … [E]n nous fermant les yeux sur notre situation réelle dans le monde présent, elle nous empêche en fin de compte de construire le monde et l’homme de demain.

These texts in no way constitute a theory of the novel; they merely attempt to clarify some evolutionary lines that appear essential to me in contemporary literature. If, in the course of many pages, I voluntarily employ the term ‘Nouveau Roman’, it is not to designate a school, nor even a defined and established group of writers potentially working in the same direction. It is simply a term that conveniently encompasses all writers seeking new novelistic forms capable of expressing (or creating) new relationships between man and the world, all those who have made up their mind to invent the novel—which is to say, to invent man. … [I]n closing our eyes to our real situation in the current world, [the systematic repetition of past novelistic forms] prevents us, at the end of the day, from constructing the world and the man of tomorrow.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « À quoi servent les théories », Pour un nouveau roman (1986, p. 9 [my translation])

Thus, for Robbe-Grillet, the Nouveau Roman is not a new ‘genre’ of novel (in the sense that we Anglophones [mis]understand the word ‘genre’) but an essentially earnest attitude of certain authors dissatisfied with the outmoded tropes of the great nineteenth-century psychological novel.

In Robbe-Grillet’s view, all authors who strive to break out of the moribund formulæ that have come down to us, generation after generation, from Balzac;—all writers who seek to grasp a ‘new reality’ rather than a ‘new realism’;—are fundamentally engaged in the project of writing a ‘New Novel’.

Before he became a novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet was a scientist, an agronomist. For him, rather than being a defined genre of postmodern, avant-garde fiction, the Nouveau Roman, in its experimental capacity, is a ‘recherche’—a scientific investigation, but also a search, a quest.

The ‘chercheur’ (the scientist, but also the novelist as seeker, as querent) is engaged in an investigation of the world of today, of man’s relationship to the world of modernity, of his relationship with other people, and ultimately, under the conditions of the post-war moment, with himself.

Mais nous … qu’on accuse d’être des théoriciens, nous ne savons pas ce que doit être un roman, un vrai roman ; nous savons seulement que le roman d’aujourd’hui sera ce que nous le ferons, aujourd’hui, et que nous n’avons pas à cultiver la ressemblance avec ce qu’il était hier, mais à nous avancer plus loin.

But we … whom [the critics] accuse of being ‘theoretical novelists’, we do not know what a novel—a ‘real novel’—ought to be. We only know that the novel of today will be what we make it today and that we are under no obligation to maintain its resemblance to what it was yesterday but to push ourselves further still.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet. « Nouveau roman, nouveau homme » (as cited in ibid, p.115 [my translation])

The form of this scientific investigation into the current circumstances of postmodern life is ultimately reflected in the ‘form’ of the novel itself, in the individual form that each ‘new novel’ takes, shaped as it is by the writer’s earnest, intellectually honest attempt to ‘discover’ its form.

And I have certainly experienced this with the nouvelles démeublées—the ‘unfurnished short stories’—I have written, attempting to assiduously follow the theoretical principles Robbe-Grillet outlines in Pour un nouveau roman.

I have alternately called nouvelles démeublées noires such as “Office at night” ‘literary crime fictions’ as I have attempted to articulate to myself how the form of these ‘New Short Stories’ operates as a function of their function.

These are not necessarily ‘crime fictions’ in the way we understand the genre of ‘crime’. Rather, as the nature of the mystery story is to discover a hidden truth in the fabric of the text, the nature of the literary investigation I am engaged upon in the nouvelles démeublées of The Melbourne Flâneur is essentially scientific, detectival, as I probe ‘the mystery’ of their essential form, attempt to dynamically discover, in the course of writing each story, what the ‘shape’ of that final story actually is as an image, as a rotatable, circumnavigable, eminently flâneurial mental object hanging abstractly in conceptual space.

The principle of ‘unfurnishing’, of taking successive couches of description out of the texts, leaving only the resonance of their traces, reorganizing the sub-imagery of the total tableau, reveals radically different ‘shapes’ and ‘forms’ from draft to draft as the short story condenses progressively to a sharp, pregnant point.

Robbe-Grillet implies that the social-scientific art form of the novel is consubstantial with the shape of man himself. To construct a new novel that accurately describes our actual conditions post-modernity is to build the abstract, conceptual form that reflects the man of today. As it advances ‘plus loin’, that current form goes beyond outmoded constructions of the human identity, culturally engendering the world and the human being we are becoming and must become to surmount the existential crises of post-modernity.

Moreover, the Nouveau Romancier, particularly the New Novelist of the Robbe-Grilletian type, concerned exclusively with a scientifically rigorous description of the phenomenal world, is in creative search of himself.

He searches for himself in the lines and pages he writes without preconception of what the novel that reflects him must be, and as such, the essential question of the scientific investigation that the Nouveau Roman represents originates from a fundamental research question about the self.

Il sent la nécessité d’employer telle forme, de refuser tel adjectif, de construire ce paragraphe de telle façon. Il met tout son soin à la lente recherche du mot exact et de son juste emplacement. … Et lorsqu’on lui demande pourquoi il a écrit son livre, il n’a qu’une réponse : « C’est pour essayer de savoir pourquoi j’avais envie de l’écire. »

He feels the need to employ a particular form, to refuse such an adjective, to construct this paragraph in a certain way. He puts all his care into the slow search for the exact word and its precise placement. … And when we ask him why he wrote his book, he has only one response: ‘I wrote it in order to try to understand why I felt like writing it.’

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « À quoi servent les théories » (as cited in ibid, p. 13 [my translation])

Why do I write? Why do I feel like writing this? Why do I want to write it in this way?

The Nouveau Romancier, in seeking honestly to grasp the reality of the present moment, is in search of himself, of his own actuality as he writes the work, and in placing every word, building every line and page, he dynamically constructs his present self in the present as he creates the novel, and, as the shaped artefact of a book that others will read in a ‘future present’, he is also culturally constructing the consciousnesses of tomorrow by his honest research into his own.

In fine, the Nouveau Romancier, in creating a new literary form of present-day novel, is inventing himself. He is also inventing the audience of the future who are bored with the moribund paradigms and formulæ of today’s generic entertainment, of phony ‘realism’, of didactic moral education in books and movies that are still beholden to the creaking mechanics of the nineteenth-century psychological novel.

I feel it myself most profoundly: A new audience is struggling to be born—in the Anglosphere most especially—and having lived for a century under the tyrannical cultural imperium of the United States—which effectively staged a coup, dragging the English language across the Atlantic and installing it wholesale in New York and Hollywood—readers and moviegoers keep frustratedly looking to America for mythos when the myth of America is effectively exhausted and irrelevant to our present postmodern conditions.

And yet, when I read the nouvelles démeublées from The Melbourne Flâneur at côteries and gatherings, shorn of their ‘audio noir’ soundscapes so that these ‘unfurnished short stories’ are merely bald, naked texts dependent upon my delivery for their effect and impact, I have seen people sit up straight in their chairs the way a dog will twist its head when you make an unfamiliar sound.

A profound signal is being sent to them.

The dark, brutally inhuman vision of human beings walking the streets of Melbourne as objects in an expressionistic world of objects—of architectural structures, like the office at night, that signify in the phenomenal plasticity of their material forms—seems to speak to people of the future we are presently living.

I’ve even tried this on the street a few times, experimenting with the stories’ ‘stopping power’ in live streetside performances, and have been myself surprised to see people utterly arrested and fascinated by the images being built in their minds of a Melburnian world they recognize from their actual experiences, but which is made expressionistically new.

So, what I have drawn from Robbe-Grillet specifically? What stylistic techniques peculiar to his brand of the Nouveau Roman are particularly crucial in disrupting outmoded ways of seeing the world and our relationship to it in stories?

Firstly, as we have seen throughout this series, and as Robbe-Grillet makes explicit in several essays in Pour un nouveau roman, description, which is generally deprecated in novels, conversely occupies a very privileged position in Robbe-Grillet’s novels.

The rôle of description, as an essential narrative tool in the novelist’s arsenal of æsthetic strategies, has become even more diminished in the twenty-first century than it was when Robbe-Grillet was publishing these articles in the mid-twentieth, with postmodern novelists typically receiving the utterly bogus advice, derived from screenwriting practice, that they should ‘show, not tell’.

In my article on the collection Instantanés (1962), I wrote that the salient rôle played by description in Robbe-Grillet’s work as a unique strategy for advancing the story linked these short stories to the imagistic practice of prose poetry.

And as, in the suite of nouvelles démeublées which comprise The Melbourne Flâneur, and which are derived from the prose-poetic praxis of The Spleen of Melbourne, I am concerned with reducing each story down to a singular, crystalline image like the one in “Office at night”, what ‘plot’ emerges from the concatenation of these images, what ‘human drama’ may be inferred from the conceptual arrangement of them as a cinematic sequence, is significantly reliant on the documentary description of streets, buildings and other concrete structures, patterns of traffic and patterns of behaviour that are typical of contemporary Melbourne life.

Then too, Robbe-Grillet identifies time as the novel’s real subject since at least 1900. The apperception that time is of a materially different quality under conditions of modernity is a fundamental subject for a new novel to address honestly.

However, Robbe-Grillet’s stylistic approach to time is typically undoctrinaire. He employs time in a technical, grammatical sense.

As I wrote in my article on Dans le labyrinthe (1959), the French present tense is as characteristic of Robbe-Grillet’s style as the imperfect is in Flaubert’s version of a ‘new novel’, and the conditional mood is characteristic of Proust’s take on same.

In English literature, the present tense is not generally used as the default operational tense of an extended narrative. We are used to novels written in the simple past tense, with the past progressive being subbed in, à la Flaubert, to change it up a little. To read an extended narrative written in the present tense in English often feels uncomfortable.

In French, however, employment of the present tense in fiction is not uncommon and feels natural. As an æsthetic strategy, however, Robbe-Grillet, takes stylistically foregrounds the present tense as much as he does description, and the two are linked.

The perception of time, the instability of what appears to be solid, is a key quality in modern literature, and chez Robbe-Grillet, this takes the form of a ‘self-effacing description’, one that appears both to write itself, to build itself up, and to ‘rub itself out’, to demolish itself as it is read.

Given the ‘étrangeté’, the foreignness of the present tense in English narrative accounts, and the fact that the style I have developed in The Spleen of Melbourne and The Melbourne Flâneur is so heavily inflected by my identification with French literature, resolving the question of tense in describing the Melbourne of my actuality has been an interesting one.

I have found that there are certain very specific uses—two, in fact—to which the English present tense can be put in fiction without the short story sounding as though it is an assignment stodgily produced by a creative writing student.

Where, for instance, there is a certain ‘shallowness’ in the décalage—the necessary lag—between an event occurring in real-time and the account given of it, the present tense in English can be surprisingly effective, lending a documentary effect to a narration which, having been written, clearly takes place in the past.

So, in my literary experiments following Robbe-Grillet’s principles as set forth in Pour un nouveau roman, an honest intellectual investigation directed simultaneously inward and outward—outward to the world, seeking to accurately describe its phenomenology in order to go inward to myself, describing my flâneurial experiences of it—I am doing my best to renew the novel via the short story—‘to Make Literature Great Again!’

On répète, de l’extrême droite à l’extrême gauche, que cet art nouveau est malsain, décadent, inhumain et noir. Mais la bonne santé à laquelle ce jugement fait allusion est celle des œillères et du formol, celle de la mort. On est toujours décadent par rapport aux choses du passé : le béton armé par rapport à la pierre, le socialisme par rapport à la monarchie paternaliste, Proust par rapport à Balzac. Et ce n’est guère être inhumain que de vouloir bâtir une nouvelle vie pour l’homme ; cette vie ne paraît noire que si — toujours en train de pleurer les anciennes couleurs — on ne cherche pas à voir les nouvelles beautés qui l’éclairent. Ce que propose l’art d’aujourd’hui au lecteur, au spectateur, c’est en tout cas une façon de vivre, dans le monde présent, et de participer à la création permanente du monde de demain. Pour y parvenir, le nouveau roman demande seulement au public d’avoir confiance encore dans le pouvoir de la littérature, et il demande au romancier de n’avoir plus honte d’en faire.

We repeat that, from the extreme right to the extreme left, this new art is unhealthy, decadent, inhuman, and dark. But the ‘good health’ on which this judgment is based is that of blinkers and disinfectant—that of death. One is always decadent in relation to the things of the past: reinforced concrete as compared with stone, socialism as compared with absolute monarchy, Proust as compared with Balzac. And it is hardly ‘inhuman’ to want to build a new life for man: this life only appears dark if—perpetually boohooing over faded colours—we do not strive to see the new beauties that illuminate it. What today’s art offers to the reader and moviegoer is, at any rate, a way of living in today’s world and participating in the permanent creation of tomorrow’s world. In order to arrive at this place, the new novel only asks that the public maintains its faith in the power of literature and that the novelist no longer feels shame about creating it.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « Du réalisme à la réalité » (as cited in ibid, pp. 143-4 [my translation])

Where the old formulas of books and movies designed to ‘entertain’, ‘educate’, or ‘tell the truth’ about life in antiquated forms are dead—and are felt to be dead—in the West, the Nouveau Roman, among writers of good faith and goodwill, is an essentially creative, participatory enterprise of research in which readers—unafraid of the radical ambiguity of our times—‘complete’ the unfurnished work presented as a sincere investigation into self and world by the author.

And thus, as Robbe-Grillet says, the only sincere ‘political engagement’ the Nouveau Romancier can have is the engagement he shows in his enterprise, in the rigour of his research for a new self and a new world, in the intellectual honesty with which he asks himself the question: ‘Why do I write this?’

Redonnons donc à la notion d’engagement le seul sens qu’elle peut avoir pour nous. Au lieu d’être de nature politique, l’engagement c’est, pour l’écrivain, la pleine conscience des problèmes actuels de son propre langage, la conviction de leur extrême importance, la volonté de les résoudre de l’intérieur. C’est là, pour lui, la seule chance de demeurer un artiste et, sans doute, aussi, par voie de conséquence obscure et lointaine, de servir un jour peut-être à quelque-chose — peut-être même à la révolution.

Let us thus restore to the [Sartrean] notion of ‘engagement’ the only meaning it can have for us. Instead of being of a political nature, commitment is, for the writer, the full awareness of the current problems in his own language, the conviction of their extreme importance, the will to resolve them from within. For him, there lies the only chance of remaining an artist and, doubtless, by means of obscure and distant consequence, also of perhaps one day serving something—maybe even revolution.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « Sur quelques notions périmées » (quoted in ibid, p. 39 [my translation])

I am deeply conscious of the moribundity of English, its absolute inability, after more than a century of degradation, to convey meaning.

When the meaning of the good old-fashioned English word ‘woman’ has to be litigated in the House of Commons, you know that the language I am writing and you are reading is effectively dead.

Thus, in the prose poetry of The Spleen of Melbourne project and the nouvelles démeublées of The Melbourne Flâneur that have emerged from it, written with respect to the principles of the Nouveau Roman outlined by Alain Robbe-Grillet in this book, I am doing my level best to reform, to renovate—to renouvelate—English by bridging the Channel, reconciling it, in one of its lines of descent, with French.

I am creating the language of the future, enacting a one-man revolution that will one day be the lingua franca of literary Franglish.

The feedback in response to my experiments ‘towards a new short story’, wresting literary English out of the cold dead hands of the Amerloques and dragging it, by force of my own will, down under, at least encourages a tentative hypothesis pointing in that direction.

To support my efforts to make literature great again, I invite you to purchase a copy of the “Office at night” single. If you’re in the States, you might be particularly interested to hear what noir sounds like ‘down under’, in the most Parisian city on Australian soil.