Jealousy and in the Labyrinth Read online

  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 thereness 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.

  In the entire published work of this author, I can think of only one metaphor, a single adjective suggesting substance rather than superficies, and applied, moreover, to the only psychoanalytic object in his repertoire: the softness of erasers ("I want a very soft eraser"). Except for this unique tactile qualification, more or less called for by the peculiar gratuitousness of the object for which The Erasers is so scandalously or so enigmatically named, the work of Robbe-Grillet is susceptible to no thematic index whatsoever: the visual apprehension which entirely permeates his writing cannot establish metaphorical correspondences, or even institute reductions of qualities to some common symbol; it can, in fact, propose only symmetries.

  By his exclusive and tyrannical appeal to the sense of sight, Robbe-Grillet undoubtedly intends the assassination of the object, at least as literature has traditionally represented it. His undertaking is an arduous one, however, for in literature, at least, we live, without even taking the fact into account, in a world based on an organic, not a visual order. Therefore the first step of this knowing murder must be to isolate objects, to alienate them as much from their usual functions as from our own biology. Our author allows them a merely superficial relation to their situation in space, deprives them of all possibility of metaphor, withdraws them from that state of corresponding forms and analogous states which has always been the poet's hunting ground (and who can be in much doubt today as to what extent the myth of poetic "power" has contaminated every order of literary activity?).

  But what is most difficult to kill off in the classical treatment of the object is the temptation to use the particular term, the singular, the — one might almost say — gestaltist adjective that ties up all its metaphysical threads in a single subsuming knot ("Dans l'Orient désert. . ."). What Robbe-Grillet is trying to destroy is, in the widest sense of the word, the adjective itself: the realm of qualification, for him, can be only spatial or situational, but in no case can it be a matter of analogy. Perhaps painting can provide us (taking all the precautions this kind of comparison imposes) with a relevant opposition: an ideal example of the classical treatment of the object is the school of Dutch still-life painting, in which variety and minuteness of detail are made subservient to a dominant quality that transforms all the materials of vision into a single visceral sensation: luster, the sheen of things, for example, is the real subject matter of all those compositions of oysters and glasses and wine and silver so familiar in Dutch painting. One might describe the whole effect of this art as an attempt to endow its object with an adjectival skin, so that the half-visual, half-substantial glaze we ingest from these pictures by a kind of sixth, coenesthetic sense is no longer a question of surface, no longer "superficial." As if the painter had succeeded in furnishing the object with some warm name that dizzily seizes us, clings to us, and implicates us in its continuity until we perceive the homogeneous texture of a new ideal substance woven from the superlative qualities of all possible matter. This, too, is the secret of Baudelaire's admirable rhetoric, in which each name, summoned from the most discrepant orders of being, surrenders its tribute of ideal sensation to a universal perception of radiant matter ("Mais les bijoux perdus de la mer," etc.{3}).

  In opposition to this concept, Robbe-Grillet's description of an object finds its analogies with modern painting (in its broadest acceptation), for the latter has abandoned the qualification of space by substance in favor of a simultaneous "reading" of the planes and perspectives of its subject, thereby restoring the object to its "essential bareness." Robbe-Grillet destroys the object's dominion-by-substance because it would frustrate his major intention, which is to insert the object in a dialectic of space. Not that this space is Euclidean — the extreme care Robbe-Grillet takes to situate the object in a proliferation of perspectives, to find within the elasticity of our field of vision a singularly fragile point of resistance, has nothing whatever to do with the classic concern to establish the dimensions and depths of academic perspective.

  It will be recalled that according to the classical concept of description, a picture is always a motionless spectacle, a site frozen into eternity: the spectator (or the reader) has accorded the painter power of attorney to circulate around the object, to explore with his delegated eyes its shadows and — to use Poussin's word — its "prospect," thereby effecting the simultaneity of all possible approaches, since every spectator after the painter himself must look at the picture with the painter's eyes. This is the source of the imaginary supremacy of the spectator's "situation" in classical painting (so clearly expressed by the very nomenclature of its orientations: "on the right ... to the left ... in the foreground . . . in the background . . ."). The descriptive technique of modern painting, however, nails the spectator to a single place and releases the spectacle upon him, adjusting it to several angles of vision at once. It has often been remarked that modern canvases seem to leap from the wall, rushing out at the spectator, overwhelming him by their aggressive pre-emption of space: the painting is no longer a prospect, then, but a "project." And this is precisely the effect of Robbe-Grillet's descriptions. They set themselves in motion spatially, the object is released without losing sight of its earlier positions, and somehow, for a moment, exists in depth without ceasing to be merely flat. There is recognizably the same revolution at work here that the cinema has effected upon the visual reflexes.

  In The Erasers, in fact, Robbe-Grillet has had the coquetry to include one scene in which a man's relation to this new space is described in an exemplary fashion. Bona is sitting in the middle of a vast, empty room, and he describes the field of space before his eyes: it includes the window, behind which he can make out a horizon of roofs and moving clouds, so that the spatial field actually moves past the motionless man; space becomes non-Euclidean while remaining just as it was. In this little scene, furthermore, we have all the experimental conditions of cinematographic vision: the cubical room as the theater; its bareness as the darkness requisite to the emergence of the new, motionless vision; and the window, of course, as the screen itself, fiat and yet accessible to every dimension of movement, even that of time.

  Of course all this is not, ordinarily, vouchsafed to us just like that. Robbe-Grillet's camera is also something of a magic lantern, a real camera obscura. For example, consider the persistence with which this author arranges the elements of his picture according to the classic orientation of the imaginary spectator. Like any traditional scenario-writer, he throws in a good many on the right's and to the leffs, whose propulsive role in academic composition we have just examined. But in the case of Robbe-Grillet, such purely adverbial terms indicate nothing at all: linguistically, of course, they are gestural commands and have no more dimension than a cybernetic message. It has, perhaps, been one of the grand illusions of classical rhetoric to believe that a scene's verbal orientation has any power of suggestion or representation whatever. In literature, beyond a certain crudely operative procedure (in the theater), these notions are completely interchangeabl
e and, of course, quite useless, having no other excuse for existing except to justify the spectator's ideal mobility.

  If Robbe-Grillet chooses, with all the deliberation of a good craftsman, to employ such devices, it is in the cause of mockery, in behalf of the destruction of classical space and the dispersion of concrete substance, the high-pressure volatilization of a supersaturated universe, an over-constructed space. His multiplication of details, his obsession with topography, his entire demonstrative apparatus actually tend to destroy the object's unity by giving it an exaggeratedly precise location in space, by drowning it in a deluge of outlines, coordinates, and orientations, by the eventual abuse of perspective — still under its academic denominations — by exploding the traditional notion of space and substituting for it a new space, provided, as we shall soon see, with a new depth and dimension in time.

  Robbe-Grillet's descriptive strategy, then, can be summarized as follows: destroy Baudelaire by an absurd appeal to Lamartine, and at the same time, of course, destroy Lamartine (the comparison is not entirely gratuitous, if you agree that our literary "sensibility" is wholly adjusted by ancestral reflexes to a "Lamartinian" vision of space). Robbe-Grillet's analyses, minute and patient enough to be taken for imitations of Flaubert or Balzac, unceasingly corrode the object by their very precision, attack the adjectival skin classical art deposits on a picture to induce in its spectator the euphoria of a restored unity. The classic object fatally secretes its adjective (the Dutch luster, the Racinian désert, Baudelaire's radiant substance), and it is just such a fatality which Robbe-Grillet is hunting down, subjecting it to the anticoagulating effects of his own description. At any cost this skin, this carapace must be destroyed, the object must be kept "open" to the circulation of its new dimension: Time.