Jealousy and in the Labyrinth Read Free Page A

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 intsruments 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 "antilological" — a matter or 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 fumée ." 8 ) 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