Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (3 page)

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 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 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.

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 like a series of slices that 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
internal 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.