Jealousy and in the Labyrinth
Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet
Jealousy
& In the Labyrinth
Translated by Richard Howard
GROVE PRESS, INC. NEW
Copyright © 1965 by Grove Press, Inc. Jealousy copyright © 1959 by Grove Press, Inc. Originally published in 1957 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, France, as La Jalousie.
In the Labyrinth copyright © 1960 by Grove Press, Inc. Originally published in 1959 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, France, as Dans le labyrinthe.
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-16711
acknowledgments: The essay by Bruce Morrissette is a revised adaptation of an article which appeared originally in The French Review, Vol. XXXI, no. 5 (April 1958) under the title "Surfaces et structures dans les romans de Robbe-Grillet," and is printed with the author's permission. Roland Barthe's essay appeared originally in Critique, nos. 86-87 (juillet-août 1954) under the title "Littérature objective: Alain Robbe-Grilletand was subsequently translated in Evergreen Review, No. 5 (Summer 1958). It is reprinted with the author's permission. Mme. Anne Minor's review of Jealousy originally appeared in The French Review, Vol. XXXII (April 1959) under the title "La Jalousie," and is printed with the author's permission.
First Evergreen Black Cat Edition 1965 Fifth Printing
CONTENTS
SURFACES AND STRUCTURES IN ROBBE-GRILLET'S NOVELS
by Bruce Morrissette
OBJECTIVE LITERATURE: ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET
by Roland Barthes
A NOTE ON JEALOUSY
by Anne Minor
JEALOUSY
IN THE LABYRINTH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SURFACES AND STRUCTURES IN ROBBE-GRILLET'S NOVELS
by Bruce Morrissette
The rising curve of Alain Robbe-Grillet's literary star continues its dazzling ascent. As early as 1953, when Robbe-Grillet launched his career with The Erasers (Les Gommes), Roland Barthes saw in the young author's work a revolutionary aspect comparable to that of the "surrealist attack on rationality." His second novel, The Voyeur (Le Voyeur, 1955), amazed the critics, won an important literary prize, and gained the attention of the literary public. Robbe-Grillet thereupon began to reveal his talents as a theorist of the novel form, publishing a series of articles in L'Express and two remarkable essays, "A Fresh Start for Fiction" (Evergreen Review, No. 3) and "Old 'Values' and the New Novel" (Evergreen Review, No. 9) which led to his being designated widely as the leader of the "school" of the New Novel in France. It is thus that Jean-Louis Curtis depicts him in À la recherche du temps posthume. This witty book describes Marcel Proust's return to earth to conduct an inquiry into the state of modern literature. In the milieu where the master of the psychological novel had expected to hear discussions of Henry James and his disciples, Marcel is astonished to find even Gilberte Swann agreeing that "today we ask something quite different of the novel," and that "psychology nowadays is out of style, obsolete, no longer possible," since modern readers have only scorn for the sacrosanct "characters" of the traditional novel. To prove to Marcel redivivus that the modern novel "can no longer be psychological, it has to be phenomenological," Mme. de Guermantes introduces him to Robbe-Grillet ("with hair and mustache the color of anthracite") who promptly recites, in parodied style, the "new doctrine." One could also cite to illustrate the uneasiness caused in certain literary quarters by this disturbing new force, a cartoon showing the Tree of Literature with numerous well-known Novelists and Critics clinging to its branches, while below, sawing away at the trunk, stands a smiling Robbe-Grillet.
Things were at this stage when, in 1957, Jealousy appeared. Hostile critics threw themselves on the novel. The old guard, with André Rousseaux and Robert Kemp, hastened to denounce it, and to assure the reading public that the so-called "new path" for fiction promised by Robbe-Grillet in reality led nowhere. Robbe-Grillet was called a competitor with the "cadastre" or record book of county property lines, because of his minute, geometric descriptions, some of which (like the notorious "counting the banana trees" passage in Jealousy) were read over the radio, for laughs. Well, the critics seemed to say, if that's the renewal of the novel, the new objectivity or the "realism of presence," there is no need to get excited. A flood of articles, mostly antagonistic, inundated Paris. Critics on the whole (but with some notable exceptions) showed a complete lack of understanding of the new work. Shortly, copies of Jealousy disappeared from bookstore windows, unsold and returned to the shelves or the publisher. The 6th arrondissement, the center of literary activities, buzzed with rumors of Robbe-Grillet's "failure," in which a number of well-known proponents of the conventional novel took an ill-concealed delight. Yet the impression was inescapable that some of these hostile critics sought to disguise a disturbing uneasiness created in them by a profoundly original creation. Thus André Rousseaux declared, in revealing fashion, toward the end of a long article, "This is a rather extended commentary for a book that I detest."
For then, as now, Robbe-Grillet's works conveyed a powerful impression that "something," as Samuel Beckett says in ENDGAME, "is taking its course." This "something" has taken time to reveal itself, and its meaning is still not finally determined, but one can, with some confidence, survey the path covered thus far. If many early critical problems seem to have been at least partially solved, other new ones have risen. Space is lacking here to do more than indicate the principal ones, and to suggest possible critical approaches to their solution.
Take the example of THE ERASERS (1953). The baroque plot of this novel may be briefly summarized: In an atmosphere reminiscent of many films noirs or crime movies, the detective Wallas arrives in an Amsterdam-like Flemish city, traversed by canals and surrounded by a Circular Boulevard. His story unfolds in an overlay of actions by other characters, seen at oblique angles and in reciprocal relationships, in the midst of images twisting in a turmoil of syncopations, displacements, and echoes of a kind that many critics did not hesitate to call "metaphysical." Wallas is seeking an assassin; he does not know, as we do, that there has been no murder. Twenty-four hours after this imaginary crime, Wallas believes that he has found the criminal. He fires at this ambiguous murderer, and kills him. But it is not the assassin, it is the presumed victim, finally slain by the very hand which sought to effect a premature vengeance.
Fascinated by the various objets troublants of the novel, by the author's art of description (in which some critics, like François Mauriac, saw a parallel with the poems of Francis Ponge describing pebbles, wicker baskets, and the like), the reviewers, following the lead of Roland Barthes' early essays on Robbe-Grillet, directed their attention especially to the depictions of drawbridges in motion, wall posters in series, the arrangement of the seeds in a miraculously described section of tomato, etc. Even here much remained to be said about the true nature of these "realist" presences: distinctions to be made between objective reality and literary reality, between the "Einsteinian dimension of the object" in which Barthes saw a new "mixture of space and time" on one hand and the purely literary dimensions of a new artistic universe on the other. Furthermore, The Erasers contains a hidden "second plot," which most critics allowed to pass unnoticed — namely, the story of Oedipus. The author himself, in a little-known brochure, revealed the presence of this "much older story which is reconstituted" in the novel; but the reviewers made only superficial references to the Oedipal inner structure. Since Robbe-Grillet's aversion to allegory, symbol, and concealed meaning is fundamental, how could the mythical "depth" of The Erasers be reconciled with its author's theory of pure "surfaces"? Obviously, a clearer view was needed of the legendary parallel so knowingly developed in the novel. This i
nvolved deciphering elements that remained unrecognized despite Robbe-Grillet's efforts to alert the critics to their existence: as to the form of the novel, its division into five acts, prologue, and epilogue, with the chorus transformed into an "omniscient narrator"; as to its decor, the temples, palaces, streets, hills, and ruins of Thebes reflected throughout, in the water of the canals, in the painting of the ruins of Thebes standing on an easel in front of a dummy in the window of a stationery store (where Wallas tries to find that elusive gum eraser which is surely stamped with the name "Oedipus," though Wallas can only recall the syllable "di," the others having been "erased" on the rubber cube that he once saw), the theme of a child rescued by shepherds in a pattern embroidered on the curtains of the city's monotonously identical houses, the image of the Sphinx formed by debris floating on a canal, the statue of Laius' chariot at the crossroads, and the statuette of a blind man led by a boy; as to the plot, Wallas-Oedipus who swears to discover a murderer who is none other than himself, the assassin of his father who is "not unresponsive" to the attractions of his father's wife, the man who remains blind before the evidence of his own identity, who understands neither the deformed riddles of the drunkard-Tiresias nor the disguised version of his own destiny related by women in a tramway, Wallas-Oedipus who, from excessive walking through labyrinthine streets and on the Circular Boulevard, returns, "his feet swollen," to close the twenty-four hour circle of the eternal solar myth of night and day, by killing, in a reversal of time that causes no alteration of the basic story, his father-victim. The "various meanings" that the author himself admits putting into The Erasers include all these things, brought together with a new art of synthesis of plot and formal structure, involving objects, time, space, and myth.
The title itself of Robbe-Grillet's prize-winning next novel, The Voyeur, is something of a problem, and its faulty interpretations have spoiled several critics' treatment of the work. Mathias, the protagonist, is a traveling salesman who lands on an off-shore island, like Ouessant near Brest, rents a bicycle, and sets out on its roads to sell wrist watches. The author has called Mathias a "character who does not coincide with himself." He is, we realize gradually, a schizophrenic criminal, who, on the so-called "blank page" which constitutes a hole in the action, commits the sadistic murder, accompanied perhaps by torture and rape, of a thirteen-year-old girl. One is reminded of the suppressed crime of Svidrigailov in Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, as well as that hidden episode in the life of Stavrogin whose "confession" remained so long unpublished. Certain critics, like Maurice Blanchot, deny the "truth" of the crime of The Voyeur, though such an interpretation seems impossible to reconcile with the images of murder that break through into Mathias' consciousness toward the end of the narrative. The Voyeur is ostensibly written in the third-person mode, but this third person blends into the "personality" of the protagonist. At the same time, chronological inversions, repetitions, variations on scenes, "false" scenes, discontinuities, and other new effects involve the reader in the action with surprising force. The unusual density or "presence" of the outside world in The Voyeur and the use of visual elements (geometry, measurements, objective and falsely objective descriptions) led critics to state almost unanimously that Mathias is the voyeur of the title: a "voyant," as Pierre Gascar phrased it, or "a man," in Émile Henriot's words, "on whose retina objects acquire a relief and an intensity of an obsessive or hallucinatory character." This idea is almost certainly erroneous, since the voyeur of the title, as a careful examination of the text proves, is undoubtedly the young Julien, who has "seen everything" during the crime, and whose disquieting attitude provokes a psychic syncope in Mathias at the climax of the plot. Robert Champigny accuses the author of something approaching bad faith in choosing his title: "Commercial reasons may have played a part in the choice of the title. Le Voyeur is a misleading title. It may even appear as shockingly ironical when the reader realizes, after 100 pages or so, that he has been made the unsuspecting accomplice of a homicidal maniac." But the truth about the title is quite different: far from creating a false track, voyeur indicates a structural center, a focus of visual lines of force.
The Voyeur also contains a fascinating series of objects and images in figure-of-eight form, recurring like leitmotives in a Wagnerian opera. Here, too, some critics would see symbols, though what is really involved is a different kind of correlation (rather than "correspondence") between elements of the plot and exterior reality: a cord rolled in an eight is used by Mathias to bind his girl victim, the watching (voyeur) sea gulls wheel above in eights, the smoke of Mathias' cigarette (used to burn the girl, perhaps) describes an eight, the doors of the houses on the island are decorated with an eight pattern like eyeglasses, etc.
If one had to name Robbe-Grillet's finest novel to date, it would probably be Jealousy. Once again, the dominant feature is the work's formal structure. A first-person narrator who, however, never says "I" and whom one never sees or hears, draws us into an identification with him, installs us in the "hole" that he occupies in the center of the text, so that we see, hear, move, and feel with him. The brief, dense, triangular plot, which has no conventional denouement, unfolds in a rectangular tropical plantation house whose porch columns cast upon the terrace shadows like those of a sun dial, cutting time and action into slices. All the characteristics of Robbe-Grillet's special universe are present: repetitions, minute descriptions, studies of gestures and movements of objects, "aberrant" things with ambiguous functions that are stubbornly persistent in their "being-there," reversals of external chronology (but following an inner order of associative causality), absence of any attempt at psychological analysis or any use of the vocabulary of psychology, total rejection of introspection, interior monologues, "thoughts," or descriptions of states of mind; and a systematic use, almost like that of music, of "objective themes," including a network of stains, whose chief example is the spot left by the centipede crushed on the dining-room wall by Franck, the presumptive lover of the jealous narrator-husband's wife A, whom we often see, with the husband's eyes, though the jalousie or sun blind of a window. . . .
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 b
ayonet, 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.