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.).

Source type: picture
Info: The Rape of the Sabine Women - 1962 - Pablo Picasso
Original size: 900x670 px. Edit