If a single critic (Bernard Dort) called Jealousy an “allegory,” many were tempted to term thus the story of In the Labyrinth (Dans le labyrinthe, 1959). Robbe-Grillet felt impelled to take special precautions against this danger, stating in a foreword that the novel had “no allegorical value” and that it was a “fiction” of “strictly material reality.” Without violating this principle, it is nevertheless possible to argue that the work is, like some of Mallarmé's poetry, “allegorical of itself,” that is, that it embodies, rather than symbolizes, the creative process that the novelist goes through to invent, incarnate, and structure a novel. The narrative “presence” who says “I” in the first line, but never again refers to himself until near the end, when a “my” is followed by the final word “me,” seems to be elaborating against the odds of multiple possibilities a story which will satisfy the implicit requirements of a number of elements assembled in his room: a shoe box containing as yet undescribed objects, a bayonet, patterns like falling snow on the wallpaper, crisscross paths left by slippers on the floor, and — above all — the various soldiers and civilians depicted in the cafe scene shown in a steel engraving of “The Defeat of Reichenfels,” whose materialization into a living, moving narrative is one of the marvels of the novel. Nowhere is Robbe-Grillet's technique of concordances more evident than here: the principle of the labyrinth, of impasses, reversals, new tentatives, blind pursuit of a goal so remote and so hidden behind unimaginable entanglements of the mind and senses that any outcome seems impossible, is applied not only to the story of the soldier and his box, but to the physical labyrinth of the city, with its identical and unidentifiable intersections, its buildings full of blind corridors lined with doors that open and close, its false soldier's refuge with covered windows, its enigmatic café, and to the style of the writing itself: its balanced ternary phrases, swinging between alternatives, its negations and retreats, its flashing on and off of lights, its materializations and dematerializations of buildings, and the like.
The quest of the wounded, feverish soldier to deliver his box takes on something of the aspect of the action of a medieval novel by Chrétien de Troyes, such as Perceval whose scenes in the hall of the Fisher King have a similar mysterious quality of unsolved symbolism. Even the disclosure of the “neutral,” anodyne nature of the contents of this box, following the soldier's death, failed to prevent some readers from seeing the box as containing the soldier's soul, handed over to a doctor representing a priest But readers experiencing the story in the innocent manner prescribed by the author may find in the revelations which constitute the denouement of the novel (which is exceptional in Robbe-Grillet's practice) a process of appeasement of tension serving to reinforce, with a lyricism that is rare in the author's works, the unsentimental pathos of an unusually touching end. Do the “scattered pages” left on the table of the unseen narrator, as the book closes, represent In the Labyrinth itself? If so, the novel indeed approaches the Flaubertian ideal of the livre sur rien, the self-contained work that is its own form and substance.
Those who have seen Robbe-Grillet's films, Last Year at Marienbad and L'Immortelle, or who have read their scenarios, can verify the assertion that most of their author's novelistic techniques recur, in more or less modified form, as cinematic structures. The whole realm of the relationship between novel and cinema remains largely open to investigation. The art of Robbe-Grillet, with its objectification of mental images, its use of psychic chronology, its development of “objectai” sequences or series related formally and functionally to plot and to the implicit psychology of characters, its refusal to engage in logical discourse or analytical commentary, is as ideally suited to film as to narrative, and may well serve as the basis for a “unified field” theory of novel-film relationships in the future. “Nouveau roman, nouveau cinéma,” says Robbe-Grillet: after the new novel, the new cinema. But, at the same time, let us be prepared for new novelistic surprises, for Robbe-Grillet is, and will remain, essentially a creator of fiction, whose structures will require the novel as well as the film to attain their fullest development.
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