Jealousy and in the Labyrinth Read Free

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