Читать книгу Two Novels: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth - Alain Robbe-Grillet - Страница 9

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 instruments 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 “anthological” — a matter of 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 fumèe"³) 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.⁴).

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, flat 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 left's, 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 interchangeable 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 overconstructed 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.

To understand the temporal nature of the characteristic Robbe-Grillet object, we must observe the mutations he compels it to undergo, and here again confront the revolutionary nature of his endeavors with the norm of classical description. The latter, of course, has had its means of subjecting objects to the forces of breakdown and collapse. But always in such a way that the object, so firmly settled within its space or its substance, merely encountered a sort of Ulterior Necessity that fell upon it from the Empyrean. The classical concept of time has no other countenance than that of the Destroyer of perfection (Chronos with his scythe). For Balzac, for Flaubert, for Baudelaire, for Proust himself (the mode merely inverted), the object is the hero of a melodrama, decaying, disappearing, or rediscovering its final glory, ultimately participating in a real eschatology of matter. One might say the classical object is nothing but the archetype of its own ruin, forever opposing its spatial essence to the action of an ulterior (and therefore exterior) Time which operates as a destiny, not as an internal dimension.

The classical concept of time thus inevitably encounters the classical object as its catastrophe or its deliquescence. The mutability Robbe-Grillet accords his objects is of an altogether different kind — a mutability of which the process is invisible: an object, described for the first time at a certain moment in the novel's progress, reappears later on, but with a barely perceptible difference. It is a difference of a situational or spatial order — what was on the right, for example, is now on the left. Time dislocates space, arranging the object nice a series of slices mat almost completely cover one another: and it is this spatial “almost” which contains the temporal dimension of Robbe-Grillet's object. It is the kind of variation crudely — but recognizably — indicated from frame to frame in old films, or from drawing to drawing in a comic strip.

Thus we can readily understand the profound motive that has compelled this novelist to represent his object from what must always be a point of view. Sight is the only sense in which continuity is sustained by the addition of tiny but integral units: space can be constructed only from completed variations. Visually it is impossible for a man to participate in the interned process of dilapidation— no matter how fine you slice the units of decay, he cannot see in them anything but their effects. The visual dispensation of the object is the only one that can include within it a forgotten time, perceived by its effects rather than by its duration, and hence deprived of its pathos.

The whole endeavor of Robbe-Grillet has been to locate his object in a space provided in advance with these points of mutation, so that it seems merely out of joint rather than actually in the process of decay. The neon 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. . . .