Jealousy and In The Labyrinth (4 page)

I have no intention of detailing the plot of
The Erasers
(Robbe-Grillet's first novel) here, but I cannot resist pointing out that this book is the story of a circular sense of time which somehow cancels itself out after having led its men and its objects along an itinerary at the end of which they find themselves
almost the same
as when they started. Everything happens as if the whole story were reflected in a mirror which sets what is actually on the right on the apparent left, and conversely, so that the "plot" development is nothing more than a mirror-image spaced out over a period of twenty-four hours. For the knitting-together of the parts to become truly significant, of course, the point of departure must be unusual, even sensational. Hence the detective-story nature of this novel in which the "almost-the-same" qualities of the
mirror-image
consist in the corpse's change of identity.

Thus even the plot of
The Erasers
enlarges this same ovoid (or overlooked) time that Robbe-Grillet has introduced among his objects. One might call it a mirror time — specular time. The development is even more flagrant, of course, in
Le Chemin de Retour,
in which sidereal time (in this case, the rhythm of the tide), by changing the shape of the land surrounding a tidal basin, represents the very gesture that causes the reflected object to succeed the direct one, welding them together where they meet. The tide modifies the hiker's field of vision as a mirror-image reverses the orientation of space — right becoming left, etc. Except that while the tide is rising, the hiker is on an offshore island, absent and unaware of the
duration
of the change: time
takes place
between parentheses. This intermittent withdrawal is the definitive and central act of Robbe-Grillet's experiment: to keep man from participating in or even witnessing the fabrication or the becoming of objects, and ultimately to exile the world to the life of its own surface.

His endeavor is decisive to the degree that it has affected the one literary "substance" which still enjoys the privileges of the classic point of view: the object. Not that other contemporary writers have not already concerned themselves with this very problem, some of them to good effect — we have Cayrol, we have Ponge as our most notable examples. But Robbe-Grillet's method is more extreme and more experimental, for he intends nothing less than a definitive interrogation of the object, a cross-examination from which all lyric impulses are rigorously excluded. To find a comparable strictness of procedure, one must turn to modern painting, where the rational destruction of the classical object may readily be discerned in all its anguish. Robbe-Grillet is important because he has attacked the last bastion of the traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space. His struggles parallel in significance those of surrealism with rationalism, of the avant-garde theater (Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov) with the conventions of the middle-class stage.

Yet his solutions owe nothing to these corresponding conflicts. Robbe-Grillet's destruction of the classical concept of space is neither oneiric nor irrational; it is based on an entirely new notion of the structure of matter and movement. The proper analogy is neither the Freudian universe, nor the Newtonian — we must face instead an intellectual complex derived from contemporary art and science — from the new physics and the cinema. This can be only roughly sketched out, for here as in so many fields, we have no History of Forms. And since we lack as well an Esthetic of the Novel (by which I mean a history of its dispensation by its creators), we can only assign Robbe-Grillet a purely approximate place in the evolution of the form. Let us remember once again the traditional background against which his struggles are enacted: the novel was secularly instituted as an experiment in depth: social depth with Balzac and Zola, "psychological" with Flaubert, memorial with Proust — in every case the degree of man's or society's inwardness has determined the novel's field of action. The novelist's task has been, correspondingly, a labor of locating, quarrying, and excavating in the dark. This endoscopic function has been sustained by a concomitant myth of a human essence at the bottom of things (if he can only dig deep enough), and is now so natural to the form that it is tempting to define its exercise (reading or writing) as what skin-divers call a delirium of the depths.

Robbe-Grillet's purpose, like that of some of his contemporaries— Cayrol and Pinget, for example, though in another direction — is to establish the novel on the surface: once you can set its inner nature, its "interiority," between parentheses, then objects in space, and the circulation of men among them, are promoted to the rank of subjects. The novel becomes man's direct experience of what surrounds him without his being able to shield himself with a psychology, a metaphysic, or a psychoanalytic method in his combat with the objective world he discovers. The novel is no longer a chthonian revelation, the book of hell, but of the earth — requiring that we no longer look at the world with the eyes of a confessor, of a doctor, or of God himself (all significant hypostases of the classical novelist), but with the eyes of a man walking in his city with no other horizon than the scene before him, no other power than that of his own eyes.

—Translated by Richard Howard

A NOTE ON
JEALOUSY

by Anne Minor

In a witty article published in the January 1959 number of
La Revue
de
Paris
under the title "Le Cas de Robbe-Grillet," Denise Bourdet describes her visit to the young writer. She accounts "in the author's manner" for the precise details of construction, arrangement, dimension, and movement which define the site, the apartment house, the hallway, the elevator — in a word, the entire distance covered to the door of Robbe-Grillet's apartment, or more exactly to the door mat on which she wipes her feet, accidentally kicking it against the door, making a noise which announces her arrival and immediately provokes the appearance of Robbe-Grillet in his red sweater. One can imagine a game in which the players would have to guess which passage of this account is by the author and which by the imitator, so cleverly done is this exercise in Robbe-Grillet's style.

Are we to conclude that any gifted author can write like Robbe-Grillet, that his style is the model of a "genre," as the acting of Madeleine Renaud or Maurice Escande can serve as a model for a student graduating from the Conservatory? In other words, is Robbe-Grillet's style a method, or is it the valid, the irreplaceable and sole mode of expression suitable to the author's enterprise? To answer, let us reread his novel
Jealousy
. The action, or the absence of action, takes place in a tropical climate, in a bungalow overlooking banana plantations, a stream on whose bank the natives are slowly shifting the tree trunks intended to rebuild a bridge, and a road leading to the town.

Five characters animate the narrative. First of all the narrator himself, or rather — since at no moment does he appear in the first person — his gaze, both impassive and tense, which takes the reader among the locales of an observation sometimes direct and sometimes reconstructed in the narrator's memory. The second and third characters are the narrator's wife, called A, and a neighbor, a planter named Franck who is seen alternately on the veranda, sitting at table in the white-walled dining room, at the wheel of his car. Christiane, Franck's wife, appears only in conversational references; she stays at home, taking care of her child. The houseboy, a mechanized character who obey's A's orders, brings the lamp, serves and clears the table, asks questions but does not wait to hear answers. Nothing happens. In the evening, in the silence and the darkness, the noise of the crickets or the cries of nocturnal beasts of prey can be heard — cries which express nothing but "the existence, the position, and the movements of each animal."

A and Franck are sitting in comfortable armchairs, their arms resting on the arms of the chairs, their hands parallel, motionless. Conversation? The narrator suggests one or two themes — commentaries by A and Franck on a novel with an African decor; the account of motor trouble. One day Franck announces a plan to go to town to buy a truck and visit certain agents: A will accompany him, to make several purchases. A and Franck have left in the car for town, 50 kilometers from the plantation, at six one morning. They were scheduled to return around midnight. Motor trouble has kept them from doing so, and they have spent the night at a hotel. Upon their return, they have offered no details. The next day, or perhaps two weeks or a month earlier — the narrator no longer knows — A and Franck are sitting at table. A notices a centipede on the white wall of the dining room. Franck gets up, wads his napkin and squashes the insect. The black stain remains on the wall, a few stumps of its limbs Utter the tile floor. A watches, her clenched fist closes over her knife. The horror inspired by the insect, Franck's sadistic gesture, the motionless presence of the two observers — everything contributes to giving this incident the scope of a symbolic prefiguration. We are beholding the gesture of murder. Who has been killed? Who will be the killer?

But the observer turns to his task: he sees what his gaze chooses to include, he does more than observe — he measures distances, counts objects, specifies the structure of the house, the shape and orientation of the veranda, the garden, the courtyard, the green mass of the banana groves, he lists the trees and the plants and, turning to regard the people, seems to film their movements, to record their remarks. And then, as though to account for an unexpressed doubt, begins all over again, trains this invisible mechanism — his gaze — and records once again, scrutinizes, enumerates, collects. Thus there reappear at different times, in skillful rhythm of repetitions: on the bank of the stream, the crouching native, "leaning over the liquid surface of the muddy river," A's tapering fingers brushing her black curls or offering Franck, on the veranda, a glass filled to the brim. By a kind of enchantment, the reader gradually identifies himself with this gaze and breathlessly follows the slow, tormenting progress of jealousy. Is this a kind of justifying evidence? We reach the paroxysm, we lie in wait for the criminal, but nothing happens except the return to the miniscule details and their undecipherable mystery. From the position of A and of Franck, from their fugitive smiles, from the description of the hallway, of the office whose doors open onto the terrace, the reader reconstructs the scenes, the characters.

Thus without knowing how, and despite the irritation provoked by a deliberately systematic, supposedly objective description in which distances, depths, shadows are defined in the terms of a geometrician, an architect, an engineer, or an agronomist, we share in fear, in the obsessive need to know. As in Van Gogh's last paintings, the images turn, circling in the reader's head as in the narrator's. The centipede, the extended hands, the motor breakdown, Christiane's absence, A's swaying gait in the courtyard, the morning of the return ... the centipede .. • the hands ...

We close the book, we know that after this anything can happen, that the narrator can kill Franck, or perhaps it is Franck who will kill him, or else nothing will happen — the protagonists will remain the same, they will keep on sitting in their armchairs, arms and hands outstretched: the houseboy will serve the iced drinks; the banana groves will extend in front of the veranda with its trees planted in quincunxes; we will see the stream with its muddy water, the natives crouching near the logs. . . .

We wondered at the beginning of these lines what we were to think of the very special form a Robbe-Grillet novel assumes. There has been talk of a new realism, and Robbe-Grillet himself has discussed the necessity of allowing the object its own identity, of avoiding any humanization. But other reasons which relate more closely to the content of the work explain perhaps why the writer chooses to measure, to situate, to define with a rigor that seems to exceed the context of a literary work. It is because, in fact, the narrator seeks to convince himself of his own objectivity. If he uses technical and specific terms in the description of objects, trees, or characters, this is perhaps chiefly to assure himself of his own sang-froid, to be able to convince himself: "I am not mad, I am not suffering from an
idée fixe,
I have no prejudices; I am sane, calm, merely observing, I only say what I see, I only see what exists."

But perhaps, too, he is merely trying to divert himself, to exorcise an
idée fixe
, to give himself something to do, like someone tired of waiting and counting his steps as he paces back and forth on the road. And then, finally, is he not, by means of this exercise, about to discover a flaw in the supposed certainty of the figures or facts observed? Then doubt would give way to hope.

Thus the style of this novel which has been characterized as "icy and poignant" corresponds to the author's enterprise. At every moment, it translates the double level on which the work functions: the observation which has all the appearances of objectivity; the torment which reaches the point of obsession. A wager, certainly, but the fact is there: the author brings off his impossible demonstration: we have lived his anguish with him; we do not know, when we close this book, if the crime has been committed, or if each person is to return to his place, to act as if nothing had happened, while the narrator endlessly pursues his futile investigation.

— Translated by Richard Howard

3
       London, a
murmur
beneath a
fog.

JEALOUSY