Monk presents a controversial paper to the Nouveau Roman Society

Thelonious Ellison’s presentation to the Nouveau Roman Society begins as an argument about how experimental writing produces meaning and ends in a confrontation that makes the argument’s tensions visible in the room. Ellison’s paper treats interpretation as unstable and resistant to easy boundaries; its reception is equally unsettled, as an audience struggles to decide whether it has been insulted and Davis Gimbel answers with a thrown set of keys and a shouted accusation.

Setting and Occasion

Before the session, Ellison walks from his hotel down Connecticut Avenue to the Mayflower Hotel on a chilly, gray morning. He feels lost and questions why he has made the trip. He has little investment in the meeting, or so he tells himself, and believes there is nothing at stake in reading his paper. At the same time, he expects the argument to step on toes, though he suspects its listeners will take a few extra beats to recognize the offense. That contrast—professed indifference alongside serious preparation—sets the conditions for the session’s uneasy reception.

More people attend than Ellison expected. The first paper, on what Samuel Beckett might have written had he lived longer and met a different kind of acceptance, is easy to follow but, in Ellison’s assessment, boring and inconsequential. The shift to Ellison’s turn brings a clearing of throats and muttering that signals his reputation has arrived with him. The audience is already primed to read the speaker as well as the paper, though the scene does not establish that everyone understands what follows.

The Paper’s Argument

Ellison presents a paper headed “PLACING THE EXPERIMENTAL NOVEL,” including an excerpt focused on Roland Barthes’s S/Z and Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine. Rather than treating S/Z as a transparent account of its apparent subject, the paper argues that the book directs attention toward the elusive model that Sarrasine might represent. It invokes Barthes’s “hermeneutic code” for the units that pose questions, delay answers, or create and resolve enigmas. The method displayed is not a straightforward summary of a novel; it follows how a text makes its own subject difficult to pin down.

The slash in S/Z becomes the paper’s central example of that difficulty. It both joins and separates the letters, while their order means the relation is not perfectly balanced. Ellison reads the mark as a shifting boundary between signifier and signified, and as an image of a text that may be cut, injured, or fragmented. The slash can act as glue or wedge: it holds opposites together while preventing them from collapsing into a single definition. Ellison’s analysis therefore makes the punctuation itself a signifier, one whose operation shifts with each use.

The excerpt extends this procedure to a passage about making a general narrative structure from the models found in separate tales. Ellison questions the confidence behind that project, then turns to the phrase “they thought”: the wording, he argues, announces the failure of the mission and leaves the beans at which the thinkers stare blank. He also notes how a parenthetical aside about the many makers of stories both seems to praise their productivity and compartments them without naming them. These readings make the paper enact its own claim: meaning emerges through contradiction, omission, and the relations between fragments, not through a stable, final account.

Audience Response and Confrontation

When Ellison finishes, the applause is tentative. It gives way to a nerve-dulling silence as people appear to work out whether they are offended and why. As he moves back toward his seat, a ball of keys flies past his head and strikes the flocked wallpaper. Ellison looks into the audience and identifies the thrower as Davis Gimbel, editor of a journal called Frigid Noir. Gimbel shakes his fist and shouts, “You bastard!” The paper’s abstract dispute over how texts signify has abruptly acquired a physical object and a bodily risk: the keys do not settle what the presentation meant, but they make the response impossible to mistake for quiet academic disagreement.

Ellison judges Gimbel’s reaction inappropriate and extreme, and believes that Gimbel has not understood what he read. He also sees him as eager to perform the appearance of immediate comprehension. Linda Mallory, another person in the audience, meets Ellison’s look, nods to indicate that she thinks the paper is all right, and continues a single, quiet applause. Ellison picks up the keys and tosses them back to Gimbel. He says, “You will no doubt need these,” intending the return as a practical gesture; Gimbel takes it as another insult and moves toward him as if to fight. His entourage restrains him quickly. Ellison describes it as a changing but constant group of four young aspiring writers, repeatedly replaced by a new crop.

Aftermath and Significance

Ellison addresses Gimbel directly: “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Gimbel,” then asks, “Which part bothered you most?” Gimbel spits back, “You, you mimetic hack.” Ellison repeats the phrase, “A mimetic hack,” and accepts it with “Okay.” The exchange does not produce an explanation of which part of the paper provoked Gimbel. Instead, the insult shifts the dispute from the paper’s argument to the author’s identity and presumed literary approach. The question seeks a specific response to the work; the answer attacks the person who presented it.

Ellison anticipates that the session will become the meeting’s talk and take on a life of its own. He expects those who thrive on literary gossip to circulate their own versions, including claims about where they sat and who threw the keys. The prospect turns the confrontation into a second text, one that can be retold and simplified even as Ellison’s paper insists on the instability of interpretation. He leaves the room while everyone gives him a wide berth, a reaction he cannot tell whether to read as fear or reverence. The scene closes without resolving either the paper’s reception or the meaning of that distance: the meeting produces a public incident, but not a settled judgment of the work.