sign on the Gare Montparnasse would be a good object for Robbe-Grillet because its presented complexity of structure is entirely visual in effect, composed of a certain number of sites which have no other freedom but to annihilate themselves or change places. On the other hand, it is easy to conceive of things that would be bad objects for Robbe-Grillet: a lump of sugar dipped in water and gradually melting down (furnishing geographers their image of erosion) —here the continuity of decay would be inacceptable to Robbe-Grillet's intentions, since it restores a sense of the menace of time, the contagion of matter. On the contrary. Robbe-Grillet's objects never decay: they mystify or they disappear; time is never a corruption or even a catastrophe, but merely a change of place, a hideout for data.
The point is most explicitly made in his “Three Reflected Visions,” where Robbe-Grillet uses the phenomenon of mirror reflection to account for this kind of break in the temporal circuit: imagine the motionless changes of orientation produced by a mirror-image as being somehow decomposed and distributed throughout a certain period of time and you have the art of Alain Robbe-Grillet. But of course the virtual insertion of time into the vision of the object is an ambiguous matter: Robbe-Grillet's objects may have a temporal dimension, yet the concept of time in which they exist is scarcely a classical one — it is an unwonted sort of time, a time for nothing. If there is a sense in which Robbe-Grillet has restored time to his object, it would be nearer the truth to say that the kind of time he has restored is one in which an affirmative can be expressed only by a negative, a positive only by its contrary. Or better still, if more paradoxically, one might say that Robbe-Grillet has given his objects movement without that movement having taken place in time.
I have no intention 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
