Jealousy and In The Labyrinth (2 page)

The scene of the crushing of the centipede against the wall, which is repeated at crucial moments in significant variants throughout the novel, forming the emotional center of the novel, raises once more the question of symbolism. The centipede incident
grows
in the narrator's mind (and in ours), taking on monstrous proportions full of erotic meaning. Such neosymbols or, to use Eliot's phrase, "objective correlatives" are encountered everywhere among Robbe-Grillet's "surfaces" of objects, gestures, and actions. Yet it would be a mistake to accuse the author of "betraying" in his works the hatred for the "metaphysical depths" of things that he has expressed in his theoretical articles, or to argue, as many have done, that the novelist is himself plunging into the "fog of meaning" (sentimental, sociological, Freudian, etc.) that he has so often denounced. It would be especially simplistic to conclude that Robbe-Grillet's "realism of presence" only conceals, beneath cunning symbols, signs, analogies, motifs, and correspondences, an even deeper "depth."

If a single critic (Bernard Dort) called
Jealousy
an "allegory," many were tempted to term thus the story of
In the Labyrinth
(Dans le labyrinthe,
1959). Robbe-Grillet felt impelled to take special precautions against this danger, stating in a foreword that the novel had "no allegorical value" and that it was a "fiction" of "strictly material reality." Without violating this principle, it is nevertheless possible to argue that the work is, like some of Mallarmé's poetry, "allegorical of itself," that is, that it embodies, rather than symbolizes, the creative process that the novelist goes through to invent, incarnate, and structure a novel. The narrative "presence" who says "I" in the first line, but never again refers to himself until near the end, when a "my" is followed by the final word "me," seems to be elaborating against the odds of multiple possibilities a story which will satisfy the implicit requirements of a number of elements assembled in his room: a shoe box containing as yet undescribed objects, a bayonet, patterns like falling snow on the wallpaper, crisscross paths left by slippers on the floor, and — above all — the various soldiers and civilians depicted in the café scene shown in a steel engraving of "The Defeat of Reichenfels," whose materialization into a living, moving narrative is one of the marvels of the novel. Nowhere is Robbe-Grillet's technique of concordances more evident than here: the principle of the
labyrinth,
of impasses, reversals, new tentatives, blind pursuit of a goal so remote and so hidden behind unimaginable entanglements of the mind and senses that any outcome seems impossible, is applied not only to the story of the soldier and his box, but to the physical labyrinth of the city, with its identical and unidentifiable intersections, its buildings full of blind corridors lined with doors that open and close, its false soldier's refuge with covered windows, its enigmatic café, and to the style of the writing itself: its balanced ternary phrases, swinging between alternatives, its negations and retreats, its flashing on and off of lights, its materializations and dematerializations of buildings, and the like.

The quest of the wounded, feverish soldier to deliver his box takes on something of the aspect of the action of a medieval novel by Chrétien de Troyes, such as
Perceval
whose scenes in the hall of the Fisher King have a similar mysterious quality of unsolved symbolism. Even the disclosure of the "neutral," anodyne nature of the contents of this box, following the soldier's death, failed to prevent some readers from seeing the box as containing the soldier's soul, handed over to a doctor representing a priest. But readers experiencing the story in the
innocent
manner prescribed by the author may find in the revelations which constitute the denouement of the novel (which is exceptional in Robbe-Grillet's practice) a process of appeasement of tension serving to reinforce, with a lyricism that is rare in the author's works, the unsentimental pathos of an unusually touching end. Do the "scattered pages" left on the table of the unseen narrator, as the book closes, represent
In the Labyrinth
itself? If so, the novel indeed approaches the Flaubertian ideal of the
livre sur rien,
the self-contained work that is its own form and substance.

Those who have seen Robbe-Grillet's films,
Last Year at
Marienbad
and
L'Immortelle,
or who have read their scenarios, can verify the assertion that most of their author's novelistic techniques recur, in more or less modified form, as cinematic structures. The whole realm of the relationship between novel and cinema remains largely open to investigation. The art of Robbe-Grillet, with its objectification of mental images, its use of psychic chronology, its development of "objectai" sequences or series related formally and functionally to plot and to the implicit psychology of characters, its refusal to engage in logical discourse or analytical commentary, is as ideally suited to film as to narrative, and may well serve as the basis for a "unified field" theory of novel-film relationships in the future. "Nouveau roman, nouveau cinéma," says Robbe-Grillet: after the new novel, the new cinema. But, at the same time, let us be prepared for new novelistic surprises, for Robbe-Grillet is, and will remain, essentially a creator of
fiction,
whose structures will require the novel as well as the film to attain their fullest development.

OBJECTIVE
LITERATURE:
ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

by
Roland Barthes

Objective n. In optics, the lens situated nearest the object to be observed and receiving the rays of light directly from it. —
Oxford English Dictionary

High on the pediment of the Gare Montparnasse is a tremendous neon sign that would read
Bons-Kilomètres
if several of its letters were not regularly out of commission. For Alain Robbe-Grillet, this sign would be an object par excellence, especially appealing for the various dilapidations that mysteriously change place with each other from one day to the next. There are, in fact, many such objects — extremely complicated, somewhat unreliable — in Robbe-Grillet's books. They generally occur in urban landscapes (street directories, postal schedules, professional-service signs, traffic signals, gatehouse fences, bridge superstructures) or else in commonplace interiors (light switches, erasers, a pair of glasses, percolators, dressmaker's dummies, packaged sandwiches). "Natural" objects are rare (the tree of the third "Reflected Vision,"
{1}
the tidal estuary of
Le Chemin du Retour),
immediately abstracted from man and nature alike, and primarily represented as the intsruments of an "optical" perception of the world.

All these objects are described with an application apparently out of all proportion to their insignificant — or at least purely functional — character. Description for Robbe-Grillet is always "antilological" — a matter or presenting the object as if in a mirror, as if it were in itself a
spectacle,
permitting it to make demands on our attention without regard for its relation to the dialectic of the story. The indiscrete object is simply
there,
enjoying the same freedom of exposition as one of Balzac's portraits, though without the same excuse of psychological necessity. Furthermore, Robbe-Grillet's descriptions are never allusive, never attempt, for all their aggregation of outlines and substances, to concentrate the entire significance of the object into a single metaphorical attribute (Racine: "Dans l'Orient
désert,
quel devint mon ennui."
{2}
Or Hugo: "Londres, une
rumeur
sous une
fumée
."
8
) His writing has no alibis, no resonance, no depth, keeping to the surface of things, examining without emphasis, favoring no one quality at the expense of another — it is as far as possible from poetry, or from "poetic" prose. It does not explode, this language, or explore, nor it is obliged to charge upon the object and pluck from the very heart of its substance the one ambiguous name that will sum it up forever. For Robbe-Grillet, the function of language is not a raid on the absolute, a violation of the abyss, but a progression of names over a surface, a patient unfolding that will gradually "paint" the object, caress it, and along its whole extent deposit a patina of tentative identifications, no single term of which could stand by itself for the presented object.

On the other hand, Robbe-Grillet's descriptive technique has nothing in common with the painstaking artisanry of the naturalistic novelist. Traditionally, the latter accumulates observations and instances qualities as a function of an implicit judgment: the object has not only form, but odor, tactile properties, associations, analogies — it bristles with
signals
that have a thousand means of gaining our attention, and never with impunity, since they invariably involve a human impulse of appetency or rejection. But instead of the naturalist's syncretism of the senses, which is anarchic yet ultimately oriented toward judgment, Robbe-Grillet requires only one mode of perception: the sense of sight. For him the object is no longer a common-room of correspondences, a welter of sensations and symbols, but merely the occasion of a certain optical resistance.

This preference for the visual enforces some curious consequences, the primary one being that Robbe-Grillet's object is never drawn in three dimensions, in depth: it never conceals a secret, vulnerable heart beneath its shell (and in our society is not the writer traditionally the man who penetrates beneath the surface to the heart of the matter?). But for Robbe-Grillet the object has no being beyond
phenomenon
: it is not ambiguous, not allegorical, not even opaque, for opacity somehow implies a corresponding transparency, a dualism in nature. The scrupulosity with which Robbe-Grillet describes an object has nothing to do with such doctrinal matters: instead he establishes the existence of an object so that once its appearance is described it will be quite drained, consumed, used up. And if the author then lays it aside, it is not out of any respect for rhetorical proportion, but because the object has no further resistance than that of its surfaces, and once these are exploited language must withdraw from an engagement that can only be alien to the object — henceforth a matter of mere literature, of poetry or rhetoric. Robbe-Grillet's silence about the "romantic" heart of the matter is neither allusive nor ritual, but
limiting
: forcibly determining the boundaries of a thing, not searching for what lies beyond them. A slice of tomato in an automat sandwich, described according to this method, constitutes an object without heredity, without associations, and without references, an object rigorously confined to the order of its components, and refusing with all the stubbornness of its
there
ness to involve the reader in an
elsewhere
, whether functional or substantial. "The human condition," Heidegger has said, "is to be
there
"
Robbe-Grillet himself has quoted this remark apropos of
Waiting for Godot,
and it applies no less to his own objects, of which the chief condition, too, is to be
there.
The whole purpose of this author's work, in fact, is to confer upon an object its "being
there"
to keep it from being "something."

Robbe-Grillet's object has therefore neither function nor substance. More precisely, both its function and substance are absorbed by its optical nature. For example, we would ordinarily say, "So-and-so's dinner was ready: some ham." This would be an adequate representation of the function of an object — the alimentary function of the ham. Here is how Robbe-Grillet says it: "On the kitchen table there are three thin slices of ham laid across a white plate." Here function is treacherously usurped by the object's sheer existence: thinness, position, and color establish it far less as an article of food than as a complex organization of space; far less in relation to its natural function (to be eaten) than as a point in a visual itinerary, a site in the murderer's route from object to object, from surface to surface. Robbe-Grillet's object, in fact, invariably possesses this mystifying, almost hoaxing power: its technological nature, so to speak, is immediately apparent, of course — the sandwiches are to be eaten, the erasers to rub out lines, the bridges to be crossed — it is never in itself remarkable, its
apparent
function readily makes it a part of the urban landscape or commonplace interior in which it is to be found. But the
description
of the object somehow exceeds its function in every case, and at the very moment we expect the author's interest to lapse, having exhausted the object's instrumentality, that interest persists,
insists,
bringing the narrative to a sudden, untimely halt and transforming a simple implement into space. Its usefulness, we discover, was merely an illusion, only its optical extension is real — its humanity begins where its function leaves off.

Substance, in Robbe-Grillet's work, suffers the same queer misappropriation. We must remember that for every writer of the , nineteenth century — Flaubert is an excellent example — the "coenesthesia" of substance — its undifferentiated mass of organic sensation — is the source of all sensibility. Since the beginning of the romantic movement it has' been possible to establish a kind of thematic index of substance for each writer precisely to the degree that an object is not visual for him but tactile, thereby involving his reader in a
visceral
sense of matter (appetite or nausea). For Robbe-Grillet, on the contrary, the supremacy of the visual, the sacrifice of all the "inner" attributes of an object to its "superficial" existence (consider, by the way, the moral discredit traditionally attached to this mode of perception) eliminates every chance of an effective or "humoral" relation with it. The sense of sight produces an existential impulse only to the degree that it serves as a shorthand for a sense of touch, of chewing, hiding, or burying. Robbe-Grillet, however, never permits the visual sense to be overrun by the visceral, but mercilessly severs it from its usual associations.