. . . there could be no doubt about Duchamp’s profound and lasting influence on Henri-Pierre Roché. Victor, the unfinished novel that Roché was working on when he died, is a meditation on the freedom that Duchamp was trying to achieve in his life. Roché saw very clearly that for Duchamp this kind of freedom of the mind and the imagination could be won only through restraint, refusal, and negation. “You must choose,” Victor tells Patricia:
Either liberty and risk. Or the so-called straight path, also a risk, and children. Love makes you . . . Love without restraint becomes empty and black. Too many loves coarsen like too many whiskies . . . To remain yourself while loving. Not to take up residence in someone else . . . One mustn’t eat the other, or want to be eaten—it’s indigestible . . . I refuse all the time. I refuse you. Who says I haven’t wanted you?
Duchamp had made his choice. The negations that were the basis of his work—negations of the eye, of the hand, of tradition, of emotional or subjective associations, of anything, in fact, that got in the way of art as a mental activity—were mirrored by the refusals in his private life.