TRIPTYCH

Claude Simon is still writing the novel which immobilizes details, things (remember when it was called ""choisisme"" and what it owes to Robbe-Grillet as its theoretician). Once again, in the familiar paragraphs without end, tableau follows tableau: an old woman slaughtering a rabbit switches to two naked boys fishing switches to a boy doing algebra who has hidden in his desk a celluloid strip of a couple making love switches to a city where a man rides down the street to go to a bar where a bachelor party is in progress. The characters--characters?--do not exist; after all this is a sphere where, as Updike once said, a man is as much as a chair or a waterfall. Ultimately nothing matters; in this essentially cinematic fragmentation, one sees little except what the eye--be it the natural or the camera eye--catches, and one wonders again whether all this flashing imagery is not inevitably submerged by inconsequence.