is it the valid, the irreplaceable and sole mode of expression suitable to the author's enterprise? To answer, let us reread his novel Jealousy. The action, or the absence of action, takes place in a tropical climate, in a bungalow overlooking banana plantations, a stream on whose bank the natives are slowly shifting the tree trunks intended to rebuild a bridge, and a road leading to the town.
Five characters animate the narrative. First of all the narrator himself, or rather — since at no moment does he appear in the first person — his gaze, both impassive and tense, which takes the reader among the locales of an observation sometimes direct and sometimes reconstructed in the narrator's memory. The second and third characters are the narrator's wife, called A, and a neighbor, a planter named Franck who is seen alternately on the veranda, sitting at table in the white-walled dining room, at the wheel of his car. Christiane, Franck's wife, appears only in conversational references; she stays at home, taking care of her child. The houseboy, a mechanized character who obey's A's orders, brings the lamp, serves and clears the table, asks questions but does not wait to hear answers. Nothing happens. In the evening, in the silence and the darkness, the noise of the crickets or the cries of nocturnal beasts of prey can be heard — cries which express nothing but “the existence, the position, and the movements of each animal.”
A and Franck are sitting in comfortable armchairs, their arms resting on the arms of the chairs, their hands parallel, motionless. Conversation? The narrator suggests one or two themes — commentaries by A and Franck on a novel with an African decor; the account of motor trouble. One day Franck announces a plan to go to town to buy a track and visit certain agents: A will accompany him, to make several purchases. A and Franck have left in the car for town, 50 kilometers from the plantation, at six one morning. They were scheduled to return around midnight Motor trouble has kept them from doing so, and they have spent the night at a hotel. Upon their return, they have offered no details. The next day, or perhaps two weeks or a month earlier — the narrator no longer knows — A and Franck are sitting at table. A notices a centipede on the white wall of the dining room. Franck gets up, wads his napkin and squashes the insect The black stain remains on the wall, a few stumps of its limbs litter the tile floor. A watches, her clenched fist closes over her knife. The horror inspired by the insect, Franck's sadistic gesture, the motionless presence of the two observers — everything contributes to giving this incident the scope of a symbolic prefiguration. We are beholding the gesture of murder. Who has been killed? Who will be the killer?
But the observer turns to his task: he sees what his gaze chooses to include, he does more than observe — he measures distances, counts objects, specifies the structure of the house, the shape and orientation of the veranda, the garden, the courtyard, the green mass of the banana groves, he lists the trees and the plants and, turning to regard the people, seems to film their movements, to record their remarks. And then, as though to account for an unexpressed doubt, begins all over again, trains this invisible mechanism — his gaze — and records once again, scrutinizes, enumerates, collects. Thus there reappear at different times, in skillful rhythm of repetitions: on the bank of the stream, the crouching native, “leaning over the liquid surface of the muddy river,” A's tapering fingers brushing her black curls or offering Franck, on the veranda, a glass filled to the brim. By a kind of enchantment, the reader gradually identifies himself with this gaze and breathlessly follows the slow, tormenting progress of jealousy. Is this a kind of justifying evidence? We reach the paroxysm, we lie in wait for the criminal, but nothing happens except the return to the miniscule details and their undecipherable mystery From the position of A and of Franck, from their fugitive smiles, from the description of the hallway, of the office whose doors open onto the terrace, the reader reconstructs the scenes, the characters.
Thus without knowing how, and despite the irritation provoked by a deliberately systematic, supposedly objective description in which distances, depths, shadows are defined in the terms of a geometrician, an architect, an engineer, or an agronomist, we share in fear, in the obsessive need to know. As in Van Gogh's last paintings, the images turn, circling in the reader's head as in the narrator's. The centipede, the extended hands, the motor breakdown, Christiane's absence, A's swaying gait in the courtyard, the morning of the return . . . the centipede . . . the hands . . .
We close the book, we know that after this anything can happen, that the narrator can kill Franck, or perhaps it is Franck who will kill him, or else nothing will happen — the protagonists will remain the same, they will keep on sitting in their armchairs, arms and hands outstretched: the houseboy will serve the iced drinks; the banana groves will extend in front of the veranda with its trees planted in quincunxes; we will see the stream with its muddy water, the natives crouching near the logs. . . .
We wondered at the beginning of these lines what we were to think of the very special form a Robbe-Grillet novel assumes. There has been talk of a new realism, and Robbe-Grillet himself has discussed the necessity of allowing the object its own identity, of avoiding any humanization. But other reasons which relate more closely to the content of the work explain perhaps why the writer chooses to measure, to situate, to define with a rigor that seems to exceed the context of a literary work. It is because, in fact, the narrator seeks to convince himself of his own objectivity. If he uses technical and specific terms in the description of objects, trees, or characters, this is perhaps chiefly to assure himself of his own sang-froid, to be able to convince himself: “I am not mad, I am not suffering from an idée fixe, I have no prejudices; I am sane, calm, merely observing, I only say what I see, I only see what exists.”
But perhaps, too, he is merely trying to divert himself, to exorcise an idée fixe, to give himself something to do, like someone tired of waiting and counting his steps as he paces back and forth on the road. And then, finally, is he not, by means of this exercise, about to discover a flaw in the supposed certainty of the figures or facts observed? Then doubt would give way to hope.
Thus the style of this novel which has been characterized as “icy and poignant” corresponds to the author's enterprise. At every moment, it translates the double level on which the work functions: the observation which has all the appearances of objectivity; the torment which reaches the point of obsession. A wager, certainly, but the fact is there: the author brings off his impossible demonstration: we have lived his anguish with him; we do not know, when we close this book, if the crime has been committed, or if each person is to return to his place, to act as if nothing had happened, while the narrator endlessly pursues his futile investigation.
— Translated by Richard Howard
JEALOUSY
CONTENTS
Now the shadow of the southwest column
In the hollow of the valley
Now the voice of the second driver
Now the house is empty
The whole house is empty
Between the remaining gray paint
Now the shadow of the column
LEGEND
I.Southwest pillar and its shadow at the beginning of the novel. II. Veranda: 1) Franck's chair. 2) A . . .’s chair. 3) Empty chair. 5) Cocktail table.
III.A.
