Alain Robbe-GrilletReviews
Author of Jealousy
Reviews
English (45) French (5) Hebrew (3) Portuguese (Brazil) (2) Italian (2) Dutch (1) Russian (1) All languages (59)
PS: se le recensioni di Goodreads sono un buon barometro, in Italia non sembra leggerlo nessuno... se hai intercettato queste mie righe, corri subito a comprare questo libro, fidati.
best images: disappearance of the tar spot into the refractive defect of the window. counting the banana trees.
worst image: the (false) centipede
"Things are things, and man is only man."Writing Against the Pathetic Fallacy
No longer the bête noire of the literary world (or of anything anymore), the contemporary Alain Robbe-Grillet (ARG) is a conscientious professor of creative writing. In his (mono)maniacal aversion to the Pathetic Fallacy (i.e. writing the anthropomorphized landscape/object) he is justified: This is the perennial feature of bad undergraduate writing.
But ARG goes beyond your Freshman (Sophomoric?) English comp elective: Demanding the novel be freed of the Elizabethan conventions of Plot, Character, Metaphor, and that Objects be freed of the heretofore unquestioned relation to the Human i.e. only to be seen as a virtual image, which is the reflection/refraction of a projection of a human desire or relation. A so-called 'objective' object - one not caught up in this relation - would then be free to be as 'real' as reality, and the human would be free to be only what it is - without supplement. Yet ARG's techniques (repetition, contradiction, multiplicity) fail to achieve this stated end (forgivable), and his 'transitional' style bungles the art of the attempt (unforgivable).
***THOUGHT
If we are seeking to unburden our perception from the tragic/emotional sensibility which can only relate to the world via the medium of a subjective impression of self-relation, and to thereby reach visual/scientific clarity/'objectification', we would be incorrect to apply ARG's approach. The 'Brechtian' undermining of a narrative/description by contradictions/repetitions in the description itself produces a void of 'subjective' meaning, but this is only a 'transition state' (in the unstable chemical sense). An object-relation in explicit contradiction with itself does not free the object, but creates a kind of "metaphysical vacuum" in ARG's terms. When Camus's 'Absurdity' is the source of this vacuum ARG responds with the following limpid analysis:
"Metaphysics loves a vacuum, and rushes into it like smoke up a chimney; for, within immediate signification, we find the absurd, which is theoretically nonsignification, but which as a matter of fact leads immediately, by a well-known metaphysical recuperation, to a new transcendence; and the infinite fragmentation of immediate meaning thus establishes a new totality,"
The elimination of all sense-relations to the object does not free it, for what is "theoretically nonsignification" leads immediately to a new transcendence. ARG's objects collapse under the weight of his technique. Trapped in a field of multiplicities, they are not revealed as objects themselves, but rather show themselves to be (transcendent) metaphor (the centipede in Jealousy), or become mere (transcendent) Words (signs without signified): In Repetition the broken champagne flute, the torn underwear, the firearm with empty cartridges - there is no question whether these objects are real or not: of course they have never existed. ARG appears to be aware of this guilty association (i.e. ARG's object is nothing more than language). ARG discusses this relation in this selfsame collection, but he appears to be engaging in apologetics. As ARG's objects have been revealed not to extend past an empty referent (word), he hypostatizes the word itself as something 'real' and thereby rescues the object.
"Hence beyond language there is probably nothing else. The world "creates itself in us" and "ends in speech," for speech is truth: "Truth when by the act of naming an object it produces the accession of man." To write is "to give our reality to truth, from which we derived it, in order to become once again, within it, light as dreams.""
It takes a certain boldness to find the base of one's 'objective objects' to be a bottomless signifier and to then declare this signifier to be the stable base you had been pursuing the whole time.
***STYLE
ARG's greatest successes occur when he eschews description and enumerates instead. (see the watches in The Voyeur, the rows of trees in Jealousy) The success of complete abstraction in the form of the number/set provides the negative space for objects to be themselves (reference to Alain Badiou/Set theory would be apt here if I were more familiar with his work). ARG should have gone further, to write more like Thomas Bernhard, whose speakers are so alienated from objects that 'objectivity' can flourish in the negative space.
Though more limited, ARG'S detailed description of the observed object are also successful. The warp/defect in the window in Jealousy is emblematic here. This is one of the few instances of successful implementation of ARG's theoretical writing. For lasting success he should have written like DFW, but he is prevented by inadequate technical knowledge and the refusal to acquire it. ARG - the savior of the object - by his own admission does not even care to look at them:
"Like everyone else, I have been the victim, on occasion, of the realistic illusion. At the period when I was writing The Voyeur, for example, while I was trying to describe exactly the flight of sea gulls or the movement of waves, I had occasion to make a brief trip in winter to the coast of Brittany. On the way, I told myself: here is a good opportunity to observe things "from life" and to "refresh my memory." But from the first gull I saw, I understood my error: on the one hand, the gulls I now saw had only very confused relations with those I was describing in my book, and on the other it couldn't have mattered less to me whether they did or not. The only gulls that mattered to me at that moment were those which were inside my head. Probably they came there, one way or another, from the external world, and perhaps from Brittany; but they had been transformed, becoming at the same time somehow more real because they were now imaginary."
This is the perennial mistake of the ambitious writer who thinks he can write anything, though in reality he is incapable of writing anything. Was it Adorno who remarked that these notions of objectivity are often reversed; that while we call 'subjective' the process which engages specific matter and substitutes perception of the object for the consensus of those who do not even care to look at it - that this is, in fact, the 'objective'.
Who exactly was the narrator?
If you're interested in this book (I can't think of any reason to read it unless you plan to live more than one lifetime) skip the first 110 pages. Or, better yet, skip to the last 20 pages. Nothing of consequence could be said to happen for 99% of the book, which is the reason for my rating. The main character wanders around a small island town not selling watches. The dialogue is mostly of the sales pitch variety. Having done sales myself, I didn't need to read about someone doing it. Especially with such lack of skill, clearly pre-judging his customers, and failing so miserably. But add to this a stifling, rococo hoard of environmental details - he spends pages describing chair legs, frilly curtains, rug patterns, carpet stains, gleaming windowpanes, puddles of mud on the side of the road, clouds in the shape of turds, and hundreds of other silly observations. With existential horror, I found myself reading it, being bored, and questioning my own sanity.
mediane, page 9
strie, page 11
de plain-pied, page12
en quinconce, page 13
casier, page 14
cloison, page 15
sous-main, page 15
cruche, page 21
amovible, page 21
anse, page 22
maculant, page 24
carnassier, page 27
vrombissement, page 27
scarabee, page 27
I can picture Lilian in 1961 sitting at a desk thumbing through a French-English dictionary. I wonder why she stopped annotating the text on page 27 only to pick it up again with the word ‘enduit’ on page 129. Did she run out of patience with the novel, struggling as I did, with the nouveau roman style? Did she skip to the summary in the back cover where she checked out the meaning of ‘aimant’ and ‘limaille’? Was she asked by someone, a teacher perhaps, to concentrate on pages 129-133 and 151-162, the only other pages subject to pencilled translations?
“I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Erasers is one of the most convoluted, complex, knotty novels a reader could possibly encounter, a novel that can be approached from multiple perspectives and on multiple levels, everything from an intricate detective mystery to a meditation on the circularity of time, from the phenomenology of perception to the story of Oedipus, to name several.
For the purpose of this review, I will focus on one aspect of The Erasers I have not come across in any of the commentary I’ve read by scholars, literary critics or book reviewers – the prevalence of ugliness in the city where the novel is set.
With its winding streets and system of canals, the novel’s city has been likened to Amsterdam, but any likeness to this beautiful, charming Dutch city ends there. The cold Northern European industrial city we encounter in The Erasers is ugly and creepy, lacking any trace of charm or warmth.
The main character, special agent Wallas, who travels to the city to solve a murder, repeatedly reflects on this lack of aesthetic attraction and beauty, as when we read: “a city completely barren of appeal for an art lover," and then again, “a huge stone building ornamented with scrolls and scallops, fortunately few in number – in short, of rather somber ugliness.” From Wallas’s multiple observations, this unnamed city’s stark ugliness can bring to my mind Golconda by the surrealist René Magritte, a painting of a cityscape raining men in black suits and bowlers, painted in the same year as the publication of The Erasers.
This unattractiveness also extends to the people inhabiting the city. Two men described in some detail are both fat and flabby and move in a stiff and mechanical way: first, the manager of the café, portrayed as follows: “A fat man is standing here, the manager . . . greenish, his features blurred, liverish, and fleshy in his aquarium.” Second, Laurent, the chief commissioner: “He is a short, plump man with a pink face and a bald skull . . . his overfed body shakes from fits of laughter.”
Tom, one of the condemned prisoners, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s story The Wall is such a flabby, fat man. Also, Antoine Roquentin, the main character in Sartre’s novel Nausea, describes the shaking hands of another fat man: “Then there was his hand like a fat white worm in my own hand. I dropped it almost immediately and the arm fell back flabbily.”
So, why am I highlighting these facts? Because I have the strong impression both Robbe-Grillet and Sartre (a great influence on the author) saw flab and fat as repulsive and ugly, a counter to the possibility of freedom and spontaneity and fluidity we can experience in our human embodiment.
In contradistinction, Wallas is a tall, calm young man with regular features and who walks with an elastic, confident gate. But at every turn Wallas encounters ugliness, even in an automat where there is a sign reading: “Please Hurry. Thank you.” And this sign is repeated many times on the white walls of the automat. How nauseating! Not surprisingly, Wallas eats too fast, resulting in an upset stomach. Shortly thereafter he returns to a familiar dirty café and he continues to feel ill.
Here are few more direct quotes on what Wallas sees in this city:
• “Mouth open, the man is staring into space, one elbow on the table propping up his bloated head.”
• “Once again, Wallas is walking toward the bridge. Ahead of him, under a snowy sky, extends the Rue de Brabant – and its grim housefronts.”
• “From another angle, the man assumes an almost coarse expression that has something vulgar, self-satisfied, rather repugnant about it.”
True, Wallas encounters one saleswoman who is upbeat and slightly provocative, but the other people he encounters, to the extent these men and woman are described, are drab and shabby and decidedly unattractive.
An entire city of unsightly sights and repellent people. Is it too much of a stretch to interpret the pistol Wallas shoots at the end of the novel as, in part, a reaction to overbearing ugliness? Perhaps in the same way the pistol shots in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (a work Alain Robbe-Grillet counts as one of his prime influences) are a reaction to the searing heat and glare from the sun and the young Arab’s knife blade?
Rather than providing a definitive answer, this raises another set of questions: Are we as readers so coarse and dull and deadened by the modern mechanized world that we accept the ugly as the norm? Does this acceptance account for the fact that all the essays and reviews I have read on this novel do not draw attention to the ugliness Wallas confronts?
Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) - French novelist and filmmaker
Part autobiography, part extended essay on literature, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Ghosts in the Mirror - a Romanesque weaves family life and growing up in Brittany in the 1920s and 1930s with the author's seasoned philosophic reflections on life and writing, both his own writing and the writing of others. Since there are only a few review posted here, I think it’s fair to say many readers have overlooked this fine work written by the foremost spokesperson of the French Nouveau Roman. Unlike his novels, which are challenging and require a bit of effort to penetrate, this short autobiography is straightforward and readily accessible. As a way of a sampling the various subjects covered, below are several quotes with my brief comments:
Personal
"I've never felt a murderous impulse toward or any sort of rivalry with the man who begot me, who nourished me, whose name I bear." ---------- The author is open and honest about his likes and dislikes, his affinities and differences, his loves and fears both as the boy he was and as the man he is. Anybody looking for the very human person behind the author and filmmaker will not be disappointed reading these pages.
Family
"My grandfather, an affectionate, kind, peaceable man with light blue eyes and a soft blond goatee, who sang "Cherry Blossom Time" in an emotional voice broken by emphysema, had spent all his active life on warships." ---------- We’re given a clear picture of the author's father, mother, grandparents and family friends, each having their respective influence on the formation of his character and creative imagination.
On His Own Writing
"I began writing novels to exorcise the ghosts I couldn't come to terms with and on the other hand, because it makes me see that the bias of fiction is, after all, much more personal than the so-called sincerity of confession." ---------- What makes this account so fascinating is the author’s linking his background, his dreams, his nightmares as well as his day-to-day living with his development as an author of fiction.
On History and the Truth
“The sinister face of the established order comes from my German (Nazi occupation) experience."
"Truth, in the final analysis, has always and only served oppression. Too many hopes, wretched disappointments, and blood-soaked paradises teach us in any case to be wary of it."
"In particular, a respect for order at all cost now made me profoundly suspicious, to say the least. . . . And if we really have to choose between that and disorder, there's no doubt I would choose disorder." ---------- Reading these three statements, is it any wonder the author recoils at the suggestion novelists are bound by strict literary conventions or anything smacking of a fixed, "real" or "true" world?
On the Novel
"Characters in novels or films are also kinds of phantoms: you see them or hear them, you can never grasp them, if you try you pass right through them. Their existence is suspect, insistent, like that of the unquiet dead forced by some evil spell or divine vengeance to live the same scenes from their tragic destiny over and over again. . . . as if they were desperately trying to gain access to a fleshly existence that is denied them . . . attempting to drag the other, all the others, including the innocent reader, into their impossible quest." ---------- What a way to view the men and women we encounter in the pages of novels! To see them all, each and every one, as victims of a spell, forced to live their fleshless lives over and over again.
On Balzac
"With Balzac the coherence of the world and the narrator's authority are both pushed to a limit that has never been reached since. The “realist" ideology is born: the world, closed and complete in a definite, weighty, unequivocal rigidity, is entirely permeable to meaning, novelistic elements are classified and put into a hierarchy, the linear plot unfolds according to the reassuring laws of reason, and the characters become types - the miserly old man, the ambitious young man, the devoted mother, etc." ---------- Novelists of the New Novel unite, you have nothing to lose but the tyranny of tradition! Anybody familiar with the innovative Nouveau Roman will hear a familiar ring in this Robbe-Grillet quote.
On Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea
"As for the philosopher figure in La Nausée, he himself admits that it's the aggressive, viscous contingency of the things that make up the external world, the moment you tear away the thin layer of "utility" (or merely of meaning) protecting us and hiding them, that is at once the source of his metaphysical-visceral unease, the object of his passionate fascination, and the initial incentive to keep a diary of "events" (in other words, of his relation with the world) and so produce a narrative." -------- Robbe-Grillet goes on to explain how this philosophical figure in Sartre’s La Nausée, a man by the name of Roquentin, relates and compares to specific characters in the novels he himself has written.
On Albert Camus's The Stranger
"And the book's power comes first of all from this amazing presence of the world through the words of a narrator who is outside himself, a tangible world in which we totally, unhesitatingly believe "as if we were there," or better still, so firmly that we can forget its lesson: the sudden, gratuitous appearance of things under the gaze of a blank consciousness strikes us with such crude violence that we hardly notice that it's the perfect, almost didactic representation of the phenomenological experience according to Husserl." ---------- This quote is part of an eight page critique of Camus's famous novel -- most insightful and provocative. Highly recommended for anybody interested in taking a deeper plunge into this classic of existentialism.
Still from a film directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet
“The world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet
For anyone interested in exploring the fiction of the Nouveu Roman (New Novel), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 100-page novella, “Jealousy,” would make for a great start, a prime example of the author’s unique style, a style highlighting precise, mathematical and frequently repetitive descriptions of objects rather than the novel’s more traditional emphasis on inner psychology or stream-of-consciousness. Reading this short novel set on a banana plantation within the tropics made for one unique literary experience; more specifically, here are six themes most piquant:
Novel As Film
English “Jealousy” is a translation of the French “Jalousie,” and in French there is a second meaning of this word -- ‘shutters’, that is, window shutters. Actually, I don’t know if any other reviewer or literary critic noted a third possible meaning: camera shutter, as in camera shutter speed working in concert with the aperture settings of a film camera. It’s this third meaning I particularly enjoy since one possible interpretation of the novel is ‘novel-as-film,’ that is, the two main character, a man and a women, could be leading actors in a film with the objective 3rd person narrator as film director, Incidentally, Robbe-Grillet was one of the top French film directors of his day.
Detail, Detail, Detail
On the first two pages we are given a blueprint of the house, courtyard and surrounding banana trees along with a legend labeling ten different parts of the house. And throughout the novel the detail continues, expressed in a kind of mechanical drawing length-and-width language, descriptions overwhelmingly visual, as if outlining specifics for a film crew to construct a set and do a filming. Mechanical engineering-like detail also applies to the surrounding banana trees, for example, here is a snippet from a full two pages description: “Without bothering with the order in which the actually visible banana trees and the cut banana trees occur, the sixth row gives the following number: twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty, nineteen – which represent respectively the rectangle, the true trapezoid, the trapezoid with a curved edge, and the same after subtracting the holes cut in the harvest.”
Alienation From Nature
The way the author writes about man-made objects and nature, one has the distinct impression the two main characters, Franck and A . . . (yes, we are only given the lady’s first initial and three dots) are in a running battle with such as engines continually breaking down as well as tropical heat, the deafening racket of crickets, the dark of the night and particularly one species of insect, sometimes wriggling, sometimes squished, described in minute detail: the centipede. Recall how Albert Camus wrote frequently about man’s estrangement and alienation from the world; also recall how Jean-Paul Sartre philosophized extensively about the alienation of human experience (being-for-itself) from objects and nature (being-in-itself). Alan Robbe-Grillet was much influenced by both Camus and Sartre.
Alienation From One’s Own Body
“Franck’s face as well as his whole body are virtually petrified.” A . . . is “Petrified by her own gaze.” Also, reference is made to the stiff movements of both A . . . and Franck, movements in sharp contrast to one of the Negros described as having a loose, quick gait. Sidebar: In Robbe-Grillet’s novel “The Erasers,” the main character, Wallas, is the one with the loose, quick gait and the people in the novel’s city are the ones that are stiff or flabby.
Novel Within a Novel
Both main characters are reading, reflecting and sharing their thoughts on an African novel that has many parallels with their own lives in the tropics. For me, this was a most fascinating part of this novella. At one point we read about Franck’s (and also the narrator’s) reaction to A . . . ‘s discussing various other possibilities the plot of this African novel could have taken: “Then Franck sweeps away in a single gesture all the suppositions they had just constructed together. It’s no use making up contrary possibilities, since things are the way they are, reality stays the same.” How about that; on the topic of things, the narrator (or possibly Franck) echoes Robbe-Grillet’s own disinclination to use simile and metaphor. And, by the way, not only are there nearly zero similes or metaphors in this novella, the sentences tend to be short and staccato.
Metafiction, anyone?
“The sentences become shorter and limit themselves for the most part, to repeating fragments of those spoken during their last two days, or even before.” Does this quote refer to the spoken sentences of the main characters or to the written sentences of the novella, or both? One more fascinating aspect we encounter – is the narrator really all that objective or is the narrator an integral part of the life of either or both of the main characters? The more I contemplate the possibilities at every turn in this little new novel, the more admiration I have for its author.
*Special thanks to Goodreads friend Ian for suggesting we both read and write separate reviews for this Robbe-Grillet novella.
French novelist, essayist, filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) was a leading voice of the Nouveau Roman (New Novel) school back in the 1950s and 1960s, a man whose creative juices flowed in original and innovative ways, revolting against the old and fixed and thriving on the new and fresh, a man whose literary output reminds me of the avant-garde, experimental music of John Cage or the outlandish turn-the-art world-on-its head creations of Marcel Duchamp. Reflecting philosophically on the novel and its possibilities, Robbe-Grillet wrote these 12 insightful, provocative essays with such titles as: `A Future for the Novel', `On Several Obsolete Notions', `A Novel That Invents Itself' and `New Novel, New Man'.
From the titles of the essays, it’s abundantly clear the author was supremely serious about lighting a stick of dynamite in order to blow up well-worn novelistic forms in order to expand narrative boundaries and create new literary landscapes. KABOOM! To provide a modest taste of what a reader will find in these explosive essays, below are several quotes along with my brief comments.
‘New Novel’ is a convenient label applicable to all those seeking new forms for the novel, forms capable of expressing (or of creating) new relations between man and the world, to all those who have determined to invent the novel, in other words, to invent man.” ---------- Literary anarchy, anyone? When did you last read a novel that invented or, at the very least, creatively expanded what it means to be human?
"The art of the novel, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation - a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion - that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change." ---------- Fortunately, the novel is alive and well today, sixty years after Robbe-Grillet penned this statement. And fortunately, the novel's many forms and shapes, ranging from ultra-traditional to hyper-radical, accommodate the tastes of millions of readers worldwide.
“Art is not a more or less brilliantly colored envelope intended to embellish the author’s “message,” a gilt paper around a package of cookies, a whitewash on a wall, a sauce that makes the fish go down easier.” ---------- By the author’s reckoning, if we as readers are looking for the author’s underlying message, we are betraying the novel as an art form; if a novelist writes a novel for the purpose of imparting a message (“In Dubious Battle” by John Steinbeck comes to mind), that novelist is likewise betraying the art of the novel.
"Each novelist, each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone." --------- To underscore the truth of this statement, all one need do is read Robbe-Grillet's `The Erasers' or Raymond Queneau's `Exercises in Style', two novels a universe removed from any preset rules.
"A novel, for most readers - and critics - is primarily a "story." . . . To tell a story well is therefore to make what one writes resemble the prefabricated schemas people are used to, in other words, their ready-made idea of reality." ---------- Now, this is radical. Who doesn't like a good story? Well, according to Robbe-Grillet, the story can merely reinforce our small-minded view of the world. In a way, this can be the acid test for what it means for a novel to be great literature: does the novel we are reading challenge us to expand our vision, enabling us to see the world and language with fresh eyes?
"How much we've heard about the `character"! . . . It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same - phony - majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism. In fact, that is how this criticism recognizes the "true" novelist: "he creates characters" . . . " ---------- Again, truly radical. Who doesn't like a novel with strong, memorable characters? And, again, Robbe-Grillet challenges us to examine why character is so important. Do we want the men and women in the novels we read to underpin our precanned view of the possibilities of what it means to be human?
"Why seek to reconstruct the time of clocks in a narrative which is concerned only with human time? Is it not wiser to think of our own memory, which is never chronological? Why persist in discovering what an individual's name is in a novel which does not supply it? Every day we meet people whose names we do not know . . . " ---------- Ha! Vintage Robbe-Grillet. This is why I see the author's novels as the literary counterpart of the music of John Cage. Do we need conventional time and an individual's name to have a novel? Do we need a musician to play melody and rhythm to hear music?
“The world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet
For anyone interested in exploring the fiction of the Nouveu Roman (New Novel), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 100-page novella, “Jealousy,” would make for a great start, a prime example of the author’s unique style, a style highlighting precise, mathematical and frequently repetitive descriptions of objects rather than the novel’s more traditional emphasis on inner psychology or stream-of-consciousness. Reading this short novel set on a banana plantation within the tropics made for one unique literary experience; more specifically, here are six themes most piquant:
Novel As Film
English “Jealousy” is a translation of the French “Jalousie,” and in French there is a second meaning of this word -- ‘shutters’, that is, window shutters. Actually, I don’t know if any other reviewer or literary critic noted a third possible meaning: camera shutter, as in camera shutter speed working in concert with the aperture settings of a film camera. It’s this third meaning I particularly enjoy since one possible interpretation of the novel is ‘novel-as-film,’ that is, the two main character, a man and a women, could be leading actors in a film with the objective 3rd person narrator as film director, Incidentally, Robbe-Grillet was one of the top French film directors of his day.
Detail, Detail, Detail
On the first two pages we are given a blueprint of the house, courtyard and surrounding banana trees along with a legend labeling ten different parts of the house. And throughout the novel the detail continues, expressed in a kind of mechanical drawing length-and-width language, descriptions overwhelmingly visual, as if outlining specifics for a film crew to construct a set and do a filming. Mechanical engineering-like detail also applies to the surrounding banana trees, for example, here is a snippet from a full two pages description: “Without bothering with the order in which the actually visible banana trees and the cut banana trees occur, the sixth row gives the following number: twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty, nineteen – which represent respectively the rectangle, the true trapezoid, the trapezoid with a curved edge, and the same after subtracting the holes cut in the harvest.”
Alienation From Nature
The way the author writes about man-made objects and nature, one has the distinct impression the two main characters, Franck and A . . . (yes, we are only given the lady’s first initial and three dots) are in a running battle with such as engines continually breaking down as well as tropical heat, the deafening racket of crickets, the dark of the night and particularly one species of insect, sometimes wriggling, sometimes squished, described in minute detail: the centipede. Recall how Albert Camus wrote frequently about man’s estrangement and alienation from the world; also recall how Jean-Paul Sartre philosophized extensively about the alienation of human experience (being-for-itself) from objects and nature (being-in-itself). Alan Robbe-Grillet was much influenced by both Camus and Sartre.
Alienation From One’s Own Body
“Franck’s face as well as his whole body are virtually petrified.” A . . . is “Petrified by her own gaze.” Also, reference is made to the stiff movements of both A . . . and Franck, movements in sharp contrast to one of the Negros described as having a loose, quick gait. Sidebar: In Robbe-Grillet’s novel “The Erasers,” the main character, Wallas, is the one with the loose, quick gait and the people in the novel’s city are the ones that are stiff or flabby.
Novel Within a Novel
Both main characters are reading, reflecting and sharing their thoughts on an African novel that has many parallels with their own lives in the tropics. For me, this was a most fascinating part of this novella. At one point we read about Franck’s (and also the narrator’s) reaction to A . . . ‘s discussing various other possibilities the plot of this African novel could have taken: “Then Franck sweeps away in a single gesture all the suppositions they had just constructed together. It’s no use making up contrary possibilities, since things are the way they are, reality stays the same.” How about that; on the topic of things, the narrator (or possibly Franck) echoes Robbe-Grillet’s own disinclination to use simile and metaphor. And, by the way, not only are there nearly zero similes or metaphors in this novella, the sentences tend to be short and staccato.
Metafiction, anyone?
“The sentences become shorter and limit themselves for the most part, to repeating fragments of those spoken during their last two days, or even before.” Does this quote refer to the spoken sentences of the main characters or to the written sentences of the novella, or both? One more fascinating aspect we encounter – is the narrator really all that objective or is the narrator an integral part of the life of either or both of the main characters? The more I contemplate the possibilities at every turn in this little new novel, the more admiration I have for its author.
*Special thanks to Goodreads friend Ian for suggesting we both read and write separate reviews for this Robbe-Grillet novella.
Part autobiography, part extended essay on literature, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “Ghosts in the Mirror - a Romanesque” weaves family life and growing up in Brittany in the 1920s and 1930s with seasoned philosophic reflections on living and writing. Since there are only a few review posted here, I think it’s fair to say many readers have overlooked this fine book written by the foremost spokesperson of the French Nouveau Roman. Unlike his novels, which are challenging and require a bit of effort to penetrate, this short autobiography is straightforward and readily accessible. As a way of a sampling the various subjects covered, below are several quotes with my brief comments:
Personal
"I've never felt a murderous impulse toward or any sort of rivalry with the man who begot me, who nourished me, whose name I bear." ---------- The author is open and honest about his likes and dislikes, his affinities and differences, his loves and fears both as the boy he was and as the man he is. Anybody looking for the very human person behind the author and filmmaker will not be disappointed reading these pages.
Family
"My grandfather, an affectionate, kind, peaceable man with light blue eyes and a soft blond goatee, who sang "Cherry Blossom Time" in an emotional voice broken by emphysema, had spent all his active life on warships." ---------- We’re given a clear picture of the author's father, mother, grandparents and family friends, each having their respective influence on the formation of his character and creative imagination.
On His Own Writing
"I began writing novels to exorcise the ghosts I couldn't come to terms with and on the other hand, because it makes me see that the bias of fiction is, after all, much more personal than the so-called sincerity of confession." ---------- What makes this account so fascinating is the author’s linking his background, his dreams, his nightmares as well as his day-to-day living with his own writing and the writing of others.
On History and the Truth
“The sinister face of the established order comes from my German (Nazi occupation) experience."
"Truth, in the final analysis, has always and only served oppression. Too many hopes, wretched disappointments, and blood-soaked paradises teach us in any case to be wary of it."
"In particular, a respect for order at all cost now made me profoundly suspicious, to say the least. . . . And if we really have to choose between that and disorder, there's no doubt I would choose disorder." ---------- Reading these three statements, is it any wonder the author recoils at the suggestion novelists are bound by strict literary conventions or anything smacking of a fixed, "real" or "true" world?
On the Novel
"Characters in novels or films are also kinds of phantoms: you see them or hear them, you can never grasp them, if you try you pass right through them. Their existence is suspect, insistent, like that of the unquiet dead forced by some evil spell or divine vengeance to live the same scenes from their tragic destiny over and over again. . . . as if they were desperately trying to gain access to a fleshly existence that is denied them . . . attempting to drag the other, all the others, including the innocent reader, into their impossible quest." ---------- What a way to view the men and women we encounter in the pages of novels! To see them all, each and every one, as victims of a spell, forced to live their fleshless lives over and over again.
On Balzac
"With Balzac the coherence of the world and the narrator's authority are both pushed to a limit that has never been reached since. The “realist" ideology is born: the world, closed and complete in a definite, weighty, unequivocal rigidity, is entirely permeable to meaning, novelistic elements are classified and put into a hierarchy, the linear plot unfolds according to the reassuring laws of reason, and the characters become types - the miserly old man, the ambitious young man, the devoted mother, etc." ---------- Novelists of the New Novel unite, you have nothing to lose but the tyranny of tradition! Anybody familiar with the innovative Nouveau Roman will hear a familiar ring in this Robbe-Grillet quote.
On Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea-
"As for the philosopher figure in La Nausée, he himself admits that it's the aggressive, viscous contingency of the things that make up the external world, the moment you tear away the thin layer of "utility" (or merely of meaning) protecting us and hiding them, that is at once the source of his metaphysical-visceral unease, the object of his passionate fascination, and the initial incentive to keep a diary of "events" (in other words, of his relation with the world) and so produce a narrative." -------- Robbe-Grillet goes on to explain how this philosophical figure in Sartre’s La Nausée, a man by the name of Roquentin, relates and compares to specific characters in his own novels.
On Albert Camus's The Stranger
"And the book's power comes first of all from this amazing presence of the world through the words of a narrator who is outside himself, a tangible world in which we totally, unhesitatingly believe "as if we were there," or better still, so firmly that we can forget its lesson: the sudden, gratuitous appearance of things under the gaze of a blank consciousness strikes us with such crude violence that we hardly notice that it's the perfect, almost didactic representation of the phenomenological experience according to Husserl." ---------- This quote is part of an eight page critique of Camus's famous novel -- most insightful and provocative. Highly recommended for anybody interested in taking a deeper plunge into this classic of existentialism.
French novelist, essayist, filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) was a leading voice of the Nouveau Roman (New Novel) school back in the 1950s and 1960s, a man whose creative juices flowed in original and innovative ways, revolting against the old and fixed and thriving on the new and fresh, a man whose literary output reminds me of the avant-garde, experimental music of John Cage or the outlandish turn-the-art world-on-its head creations of Marcel Duchamp. Reflecting philosophically on the novel and its possibilities, Robbe-Grillet wrote these 12 insightful, provocative essays with such titles as: `A Future for the Novel', `On Several Obsolete Notions', `A Novel That Invents Itself' and `New Novel, New Man'.
From the titles of the essays, it’s abundantly clear the author was supremely serious about lighting a stick of dynamite in order to blow up well-worn novelistic forms in order to expand narrative boundaries and create new literary landscapes. KABOOM! To provide a modest taste of what a reader will find in these explosive essays, below are several quotes along with my brief comments.
‘New Novel’ is a convenient label applicable to all those seeking new forms for the novel, forms capable of expressing (or of creating) new relations between man and the world, to all those who have determined to invent the novel, in other words, to invent man.” ---------- Literary anarchy, anyone? When did you last read a novel that invented or, at the very least, creatively expanded what it means to be human?
"The art of the novel, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation - a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion - that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change." ---------- Fortunately, the novel is alive and well today, sixty years after Robbe-Grillet penned this statement. And fortunately, the novel's many forms and shapes, ranging from ultra-traditional to hyper-radical, accommodate the tastes of millions of readers worldwide.
“Art is not a more or less brilliantly colored envelope intended to embellish the author’s “message,” a gilt paper around a package of cookies, a whitewash on a wall, a sauce that makes the fish go down easier.” ---------- By the author’s reckoning, if we as readers are looking for the author’s underlying message, we are betraying the novel as an art form; if a novelist writes a novel for the purpose of imparting a message (“In Dubious Battle” by John Steinbeck comes to mind), that novelist is likewise betraying the art of the novel.
"Each novelist, each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone." --------- To underscore the truth of this statement, all one need do is read Robbe-Grillet's `The Erasers' or Raymond Queneau's `Exercises in Style', two novels a universe removed from any preset rules.
"A novel, for most readers - and critics - is primarily a "story." . . . To tell a story well is therefore to make what one writes resemble the prefabricated schemas people are used to, in other words, their ready-made idea of reality." ---------- Now, this is radical. Who doesn't like a good story? Well, according to Robbe-Grillet, the story can merely reinforce our small-minded view of the world. In a way, this can be the acid test for what it means for a novel to be great literature: does the novel we are reading challenge us to expand our vision, enabling us to see the world and language with fresh eyes?
"How much we've heard about the `character"! . . . It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same - phony - majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism. In fact, that is how this criticism recognizes the "true" novelist: "he creates characters" . . . " ---------- Again, truly radical. Who doesn't like a novel with strong, memorable characters? And, again, Robbe-Grillet challenges us to examine why character is so important. Do we want the men and women in the novels we read to underpin our precanned view of the possibilities of what it means to be human?
"Why seek to reconstruct the time of clocks in a narrative which is concerned only with human time? Is it not wiser to think of our own memory, which is never chronological? Why persist in discovering what an individual's name is in a novel which does not supply it? Every day we meet people whose names we do not know . . . " ---------- Ha! Vintage Robbe-Grillet. This is why I see the author's novels as the literary counterpart of the music of John Cage. Do we need conventional time and an individual's name to have a novel? Do we need a musician to play melody and rhythm to hear music?
“I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Erasers is one of the most convoluted, complex, knotty novels a reader could possibly encounter, a novel that can be approached from multiple perspectives and on multiple levels, everything from an intricate detective mystery to a meditation on the circularity of time, from the phenomenology of perception to the story of Oedipus, to name several. For the purpose of this review, I will focus on one aspect of The Erasers I have not come across in any of the commentary I’ve read by scholars, literary critics or book reviewers – the prevalence of ugliness in the city where the novel is set.
With its winding streets and system of canals, the novel’s city has been likened to Amsterdam, but any likeness to this beautiful, charming Dutch city ends there. The cold Northern European industrial city we encounter in The Erasers is ugly and creepy, lacking any trace of charm or warmth. The main character, special agent Wallas, who travels to the city to solve a murder, repeatedly reflects on this lack of aesthetic attraction and beauty, as when we read: “a city completely barren of appeal for an art lover," and then again, “a huge stone building ornamented with scrolls and scallops, fortunately few in number – in short, of rather somber ugliness.” From Wallas’s multiple observations, this unnamed city’s stark ugliness can bring to my mind Golconda by the surrealist René Magritte, a painting of a cityscape raining men in black suits and bowlers, painted in the same year as the publication of The Erasers.
This unattractiveness also extends to the people inhabiting the city. Two men described in some detail are both fat and flabby and move in a stiff and mechanical way: first, the manager of the café, portrayed as follows: “A fat man is standing here, the manager . . . greenish, his features blurred, liverish, and fleshy in his aquarium.” Second, Laurent, the chief commissioner: “He is a short, plump man with a pink face and a bald skull . . . his overfed body shakes from fits of laughter.”
Tom, one of the condemned prisoners, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s story The Wall is such a flabby, fat man. Also, Antoine Roquentin, the main character in Sartre’s novel Nausea, describes the shaking hands of another fat man: “Then there was his hand like a fat white worm in my own hand. I dropped it almost immediately and the arm fell back flabbily.”
So, why am I highlighting these facts? Because I have the strong impression both Robbe-Grillet and Sartre (who had a great influence on Robbe-Grillet) saw flab and fat as repulsive and ugly, a counter to the possibility of freedom and spontaneity and fluidity we can experience in our human embodiment.
In contradistinction, Wallas is a tall, calm young man with regular features and who walks with an elastic, confident gate. But at every turn Wallas encounters ugliness, even in an automat where there is a sign reading: “Please Hurry. Thank you.” And this sign is repeated many times on the white walls of the automat. How nauseating! Not surprisingly, Wallas eats too fast, resulting in an upset stomach. Shortly thereafter he returns to a familiar dirty café and he continues to feel ill.
Here are few more direct quotes on what Wallas sees in this city:
• “Mouth open, the man is staring into space, one elbow on the table propping up his bloated head.”
• “Once again, Wallas is walking toward the bridge. Ahead of him, under a snowy sky, extends the Rue de Brabant – and its grim housefronts.”
• “From another angle, the man assumes an almost coarse expression that has something vulgar, self-satisfied, rather repugnant about it.”
True, Wallas encounters one saleswoman who is upbeat and slightly provocative, but the other people he encounters, to the extent these men and woman are described, are drab and shabby and decidedly unattractive. An entire city of unsightly sights and repellent people. Is it too much of a stretch to interpret the pistol Wallas shoots at the end of the novel as, in part, a reaction to overbearing ugliness? Perhaps in the same way the pistol shots in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (a work Alain Robbe-Grillet counts as one of his prime influences) are a reaction to the searing heat and glare from the sun and the young Arab’s knife blade?
Rather than providing a definitive answer, this raises another question: Are we as readers so coarse and dull and deadened by the modern mechanized world that we accept the ugly as the norm? Does this acceptance account for the fact that all the essays and reviews I have read on this novel do not draw attention to the ugliness Wallas confronts?
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poetontheone | 4 other reviews | Jul 5, 2015 |
poetontheone | 4 other reviews | Jul 5, 2015 | 
The first-person narrator is far from omniscient, offering numerous contradictions, and sometimes pausing to question details in the story being told. It is not even clear whether the Blue Villa is truly in Hong Kong, or whether it is merely a place where reminiscences and/or fantasies about Hong Kong find a home. There is a short list of characters who are multiplied by the effects of perspective, as demonstrated in their repeatedly-transformed names: Ava, Eva, Eve; Johnson, Johnston, Jonestone; Loraine, Lauren, and so on.
To the extent that a plot makes itself detectable, it involves human trafficking, the narcotics trade, Cold War espionage, elite society intrigue, murder, and even cannibalism. But the focus is on recurring motifs told with conspicuously similar details, such as travels by taxi, a girl walking a dog, a transaction over a desk, menace from the authorities, a magazine advertisement, a woman lying on her side and propped on one elbow. At points, the story re-enters a familiar groove and contents itself with an "etc." or even "etc. etc."
There are no chapter divisions, and the story "resolves" only in the manner of a musical composition, by returning to the chord which is thus revealed to be its tonic. Avowedly a fiction, it avoids showing the reader enough consistency or narrative authority to determine an "objective" course of events in the surfeit of description. Instead, the dreamlike associations of the text invite the reader to share in the manicured fantasy where the author wanders.
3 paradoxosalpha | 1 other review | Mar 31, 2015 |
paradoxosalpha | 1 other review | Mar 31, 2015 | Lack of traditional narrative devices coupled with shifting layered repetition of dubiously relevant minutiae results in reading pleasure of mesmeric proportions.
This is another of Robbe-Grillet’s collage novels, assembled from some of his existing texts. Less subtle in its sinister mystery than predecessor novel Topology of a Phantom City, it nonetheless treads familiar ground as that novel, concerned as it is with the murder of an adolescent girl, possibly by mistake, or as a ritual sacrifice, or not at all, for it's possible it was only a performance.
Two main differences between these books are the narration style and the details of the sadistic eroticism that is portrayed, be it 'real', acted out, or imagined. Here, the itinerant narrator (participant, observer, suspect, investigator, or all of the above) is more present, frequently breaking the spell cast by R-G’s hypnotic prose, and as such, acting as more of an intrusion than a curiosity. The narrator also adopts a more bemused role than in Topology, occasionally expressing befuddlement at the structure of the constantly shifting and recreating narrative. The levity generated by these moments yields somewhat of a dampening effect on R-G’s ever-expanding fictional forays into sadism and erotic fetishism. However, the erotic elements of the narrative and the proclivities of the 'characters', described as they always are in flat, clinical language, are much more detailed and lurid here than in Topology, resulting in a substantial loss of the hazy, obscure atmosphere found in that earlier novel. It is almost as if, over a period of novels, R-G was slowly losing (or purposively releasing) his restraint in showcasing what could be read (and have been alluded by him in interviews to be) his own fantasies.
Regardless of how one chooses to interpret this aspect of R-G’s writing, it is now presented here so boldly as to become the over-exposed centerpiece, whereas in Topology and the much earlier novel The Voyeur, it was the suspense of fragmented allusions to it that drove much of the narrative. On a broader scale, the process by which R-G keeps the reader in the dark as to what is actually happening or imagined to be happening or dreamed to be happening has become more defined in this novel, less evasive in its resistance to categorization. While it’s possible that this effect is due, at least in part, to the nature of the collaged texts and the assemblage techniques used, this does not alter the fact that, to this reader at least, it renders the final text less imbued with mystery, and therefore less captivating. (2.5/5.0)
3 S.D. | 2 other reviews | Apr 5, 2014 |
S.D. | 2 other reviews | Apr 5, 2014 | Line of grey water. Iron rings submerge in waves. Series of lines, connecting, network of curves, angles. Shortcut to the cottages, all the same, one-story, single window. Only four miles long. Keep to schedule. Knock on wooden door, knock again with ring. Enter, first door on the right. New oilcloth on table. Press the clasps. Open the suitcase, remove the cardboard strips. Waterproof, shockproof.
Figure eight of cord, greasy. String collection, the cupboard not locked, empty. Chromium-plated bicycle. Ride into yellow light. Sun glints on fenders. Chain noisy, chain quiet, fix the chain, fix the chain, the chain is fine. How much time. How to account, the memorandum book, the suitcase, lay book in the cover. Figure eight around island. Series of lines. Half-smoked cigarettes. The parapet, a timorous face. Violet, Violet...little Jacqueline...grey sweater, just a rag.
Close-fitting black dress. Delicate skin. Nape of neck exposed, tip of a vertebra, thin black cloth, wrists behind back, kneeling. Remove the cardboard strips. Face of watch. The time, the time...it spreads, retracts. Path along the fields. Grey gull perched on a post. All afternoon, drawing. A single window. Draw it all day. Light only reaches so far. The table below the window. Beyond the light, into the corners, the shadows, come forward. Four panes of window. Finger to her mouth. Spider crabs. Laughing. The steamer, the sheep disturbed. Too close to the edge.
Iron rings, submerge, waves cover rust marks. Another glass of absinthe. Gumdrops. The suitcase, angles, copper rivets. Press the clasps. Remove the protective paper, the cardboard strips. Close the loop of an eight.
Reading Robbe-Grillet novels induces some type of fugue state in my reading mind. I only ever have a dim understanding of what is transpiring in the text and yet I read on transfixed, certain there will be no resolution and that at the end I will know little more than when I began. R-G's constant reconfiguring of events, of settings, of objects, his replacing, adding, omitting, contradicting, it seems like it should be maddening but instead yields a languorous effect.
This book builds on R-G's previous novels, feeling like an expansion on those, though I cannot yet put into words a description of how it expands, except to note that there are passages that read like prose poetry, not something I recall encountering in his earlier novels that I've read. Also, this is one of his collage novels, having been knit together from previous pieces of writing. The book, as with the others I've read, in a sense, goes nowhere, though in a vaguely systematic way. Often I prefer a light coating of humor in these cases, but there is no humor. Well, I do recall at one point laughing inwardly at something, though I'm skeptical of its intentionality as humor in the text. And concerning the erratic and ambiguous narrator, possibly one of the most unreliable in the history of literature, this shifting I sometimes we sometimes not there at all could be distracting, no? Oddly, no.
R-G seems to be telling us, over and over, like a hammer striking an anvil at discordant intervals, that there is no way of knowing exactly at any given moment what is really going on. What you have are shards, what you have is infinite versioning, what you don't have is fixity. You will never know and knowing you will never know sometimes brings its own queer satisfaction.
In his article 'On Several Obsolete Notions' later reprinted in For a New Novel, Robbe-Grillet wrote that 'to tell a story has become strictly impossible', a rather extreme statement with which I can't say I agree, but which serves as a suitable entry point to explaining his approach to fiction. Annie Dillard, in her book Living by Fiction, opined that such fiction, fiction without story so to speak, is 'unlikely to engage deeply our senses or our hearts' but its 'attraction for the mind may be considerable.' And it is indeed my mind, not my heart, which is so drawn to this book, and in general to R-G's fiction.
It feels like a mesmeric mystery with no crime and no detective. It is unsolvable. Or is it. Lucky for me the person who previously owned this copy figured it all out and wrote the five-word solution on the last page. I shall use my Ouija board to interface with the specter of Chief Inspector R-G immediately and report the findings.
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While some of the passages and images are fascinating, this deliberately disjointed novel of murder and misogyny fails as a whole, even as a work of pornography. Perhaps I lack the patience to sort it all out, or--even with the timeline at the end--the ability to care about the obtuse story at all.½