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, mat 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 involved 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 Emile 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” mat 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
