Two Novels: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. Alain Robbe-Grillet

of detailing the plot of The Erasers (Robbe-Grillet's first novel) here, but I cannot resist pointing out mat 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 modules 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 endoscopie 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

      ¹ See “Three Reflected Visions,” Evergreen Review Vol. I, No. 3.

      ² In the empty Orient, how great my suffering became.

      ³ London, a murmur beneath a fog.

      ⁴ But the lost jewels of ancient Palmyra, the unknown metals, the pearls of the sea. . . .

      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 track 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