Nouveau roman reading demands coordinating unrelated plot strings that shift without warning

Evidence

Some will remember what reading a nouveau roman felt like. Les corps conducteurs begins with window displays in a downtown street; someone seems to be sick and nauseous, resting on a fire hydrant; conquistadors are struggling through the jungle; an airplane is flying overhead, between North and South America; a man (the same?) is trying vainly by phone to persuade a woman to continue their affair (later on, we see them in bed, presumably during the previous night); a man (the same?) visits a doctor’s office (but in Manhattan or in a South American city?); a man (the same?) visits a South American writers’ congress in which the social role of art is debated, various works of art (Poussin’s Orion, a Picasso print) are described or alluded to in the intervals, but we are unable to decide if the “protagonist” has just seen them somewhere. We learn to make an inventory of these plot strings and to coordinate them — something done in two contradictory operations — by learning to tell them apart and by conjecturing their larger interrelationship (the nameless male protagonist must be a single character: he must therefore be on a trip from North to South America, etc.). We will come back to these operations later on. Suffice it for the moment to underscore the historic peculiarity of a reading in which we strain to identify what is happening beneath our eyes (is he sitting down in the street?) while nervously anticipating the next shift without warning to an unrelated plot string, something that can happen in midsentence, although it most often occurs in the gap between them, opening that up to a more profound silence on either side of each utterance than obtains in Flaubert. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 326

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely defines what reading a nouveau roman entails: inventorying disconnected plot strings and conjecturing their interrelation through two contradictory operations.
• XREF: The ‘two contradictory operations’ recur later in the chapter where Jameson formalizes them — this passage seeds that payoff.