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Gertrude Stein at Marienbad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Strother B. Purdy
Strother B. Purdy*
Affiliation:
Marquette University Milwaukee, Wis.
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Abstract

There is a strong parallel, in form and in theoretical basis, between the writing of Gertrude Stein and Alain Robbe-Grillet's film L'Année dernière à Marienbad. The power and depth of the film demonstrate that Gertrude Stein's theory failed only because it was applied in the wrong medium; Robbe-Grillet's combination of images with words brings out its full artistic possibilities. That his work should so re-create hers, bringing out its latent value, is more fortuitous than a matter of conscious influence, but both artists spring to some extent from common modern tendencies in art and literature. Robbe-Grillet's critical essays share many conceptions with Gertrude Stein's, and would have led to an art as impenetrable as hers if he had followed his own prescriptions closely, but his repetition of word patterns accompanied by image patterns gives Marienbad that which Tender Buttons and A Novel of Thank You lack. Marienbad rises to the level of metaphor, and gives a dramatic meaning to the art without time, without plot, without character, and without outcome, that Gertrude Stein put forward in the early twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 5 , October 1970 , pp. 1096 - 1105
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

Note 1 in page 1096 Lectures in America (Boston, 1957), pp. 176–77. The analogy has been taken up, along with that to Cubist painting, by many critics. Frederick J. Hoffman, in his Gertrude Stein (Minneapolis, Minn., 1961), p. 21, wrote. “Narration, therefore, is a succession of these minute, subtle gradations of change; the image is substantially what it has always been, but it admits slowly accretions of variant meaning.” And Michael J. Hoffman, in his The Development of Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein (Philadelphia, 1965), p. 160, writes, “We shall call this the ‘cinema technique’ because like the moving picture frames they resemble, each of the sentences repeats most of what has been stated in the previous sentence and adds a very small additional piece of information.”

Note 2 in page 1097 Lectures, pp. 168–69.

Note 3 in page 1097 The Making of Americans (New York, 1966), p. 455.

Note 4 in page 1097 Lectures, p. 177.

Note 5 in page 1097 Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York, 1962), pp. 513, 516.

Note 6 in page 1097 Making of Americans, pp. 183, 284, 289, 290, 295.

Note 7 in page 1097 This has been cruelly put, by Frederick J. Hoffman, as “after Three Lives . . . she could write only about how to write,” in The Mortal No (Princeton, N. J., 1964), p. 360.

Note 8 in page 1097 A Novel of Thank You (New Haven, Conn., 1958), p. 30.

Note 9 in page 1098 Gertrude Stein, p. 18.

Note 10 in page 1098 Laurent Le Sage, The French New Novel (University Park, Pa., 1962), p. 28. Le Sage quotes from Bruce Morris-sette, “New Structure in the Novel : Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet,” Evergreen Review, 3 (1959), 105. I do not mean here to deny that a writer can imitate musical form—as it is conventionally described in words. The effort is almost necessarily mechanical (Huxley's Point Counter Point) and superficial (Lanier's “The Symphony”), like Herbert's or Cummings' assumption of spatial form. The “Sirens” episode of Joyce's Ulysses is an outstanding attempt to go further. Semantic content has been assigned to music by writers of program music, but it is not conventional. It could be (tone languages can, for instance, justifiably be called more “musical” than stress languages), but it isn't.

Note 11 in page 1098 Last Year at Marienbad, scenario and dialogue by Alain Robbe-Grillet, directed by Alain Resnais. Distributed by Astor Films. English subtitles by Noelle Gillmor. Print supplied courtesy of Audio Film Center, Chicago. I quote from the English subtitles here and subsequently because the film and the ciné-roman differ in several places. I believe the subtitles are substantially accurate.

Note 12 in page 1099 Novel of Thank You, pp. 72–74.

Note 13 in page 1099 Here I cover ground of interpretation that is highly controversial. I dismiss Resnais' implied interpretation of the film he made (in Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 123) as the effort of a man used to linear, progressive narrative, to construct such a narrative. Since he followed Robbe-Grillet's text on the whole very closely, he could not do so, and what he thinks of his attempt is essentially irrelevant. The differences between the text and the film are not such as to make more of a conventional story: the greatest is the part-suppression of the rape scene, and that might have been done for fear of censorship. Bruce Morrissette, in his Les Romans de Robbe-Grillet (Paris, 1963), p. 203, states that Resnais substituted the “white scene” for the rape, but the actual order of shots is as follows: X climbing stairs / A on bed, X entering in silhouette and approaching bed as she draws back with expression of fear, raising her arms as if to protect herself / pan rearward out door of room, cutting off view of scene / swift pan down long hall w. overexposed “white effect” / at end of hall swift turn into short side corridor and into room at end, where A stands opening her arms wide in welcome (the “white scene”). Clearly the rape scene is cut, but not cut out or replaced by the white scene (Morrissette, p. 208), except in that X may be “composing” a scene of force into one of consent.

Note 14 in page 1099 Pour un nouveau roman (Paris, 1963), pp. 166–67. So Morrissette refers to the “circularity” of the film in his Alain Robbe-Grillet (New York, 1965), p. 35; in parallel fashion La Jalousie has both its first and last chapters entitled “Maintenant l'ombre du pilier,” and Olga Bernai, in her Alain Robbe-Grillet: le roman de l'absence (Paris, 1964), p. 152, says that it “se termine donc par ou il avait commencé, la conscience du narrateur va recommencer son parcours circulaire.” The film L'Immortelle introduces all its themes in the first few minutes, and then reworks them.

Note 15 in page 1099 Despite a difference in stage setting, the two actors and their costumes are the same. The first set was the garden, the second an interior; this can itself be said to match the garden/hotel-interior alternation of the film as a whole. Dina Dreyfus, “Cinéma et roman,” Revue d'Esthétique, 15 (1962), 77–79, says “Le thème dominant, dans toutes ces œuvres [of Robbe-Grillet] est la répétition. … On voit le lien qui existe entre le thème de la répétition et le thème du labyrinthe: l'un et l'autre désignent un monde sans issue.”

Note 16 in page 1099 Lectures, p. 194.

Note 17 in page 1099 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1933), p. 145.

Note 18 in page 1100 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 177.

Note 19 in page 1100 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 169.

Note 20 in page 1100 Selected Writings, pp. 516, 517.

Note 21 in page 1100 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 166.

Note 22 in page 1100 Abstractionism, p. 136.

Note 23 in page 1100 The Geographical History of America (New York, 1936), p. 117, quoted by Allegra Stewart, Gertrude Stein and the Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 46.

Note 24 in page 1100 Lectures, p. 217.

Note 25 in page 1100 “Introduction,” L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Paris, 1961), p. 12.

Note 26 in page 1100 Gertrude Stein's work is generally rejected, while the books published on it take the other choice of forcing explication—Stewart (Gertrude Stein and the Present) strains manfully to get an ordered relation to anatomy, but must admit at the same time, “I do not mean that one can always translate . . . into logical English or convince every reader that there is any ‘right’ reading” (p. 79). Bruce Morrissette cannot resist the temptation to apply the grille of a textbook on hypnotism to Marienbad, and to find order in its chronology and motivation, because, one feels, he would be otherwise unable to write about it—and he apologizes while doing so (Romans de Robbe-Grillel, Ch. vi; Alain Robbe-Grillet, pp. 7–9).

Note 27 in page 1101 Lectures, p. 167.

Note 28 in page 1101 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 37.

Note 29 in page 1101 “Sur quelques notions périmées” (1957), repr. in Pour un nouveau roman.

Note 30 in page 1101 Novel of Thank You, p. 93.

Note 31 in page 1101 P. 43.

Note 32 in page 1101 Pour un nouveau roman, pp. 21, 42, 51. Absence of authorial point of view is of course possible along with conventional time scheme and plot, as in Madame Bovary. It can be argued, however, that no one can write without an attitude toward what he is writing, so that the author is always somehow discoverable in his work.

Note 33 in page 1101 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 49.

Note 34 in page 1101 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 49.

Note 35 in page 1101 The Autobiography, p. 259.

Note 36 in page 1101 In his section on the Arrow of Time, David Hawkins, The Language of Nature: An Essay in the Philosophy of Science (San Francisco, 1964), p. 217, takes the example of losing order as cards are shuffled: “If the direction of time is defined as that of decreasing order, of increasing entropy, then, on the average, there is no direction at all. Applied cosmologically, such a model means that, by going far enough into our past or our future, we should reach a time when the direction was reversed; in our future there might be beings for whom the direction was the opposite of ours, so that they also would say that our world lay in their future.” We could say that the games of nim in Marienbad are directional, for their moves cannot be played backward, but no order among the games, after the first, is indicated.

Note 37 in page 1102 “Introduction,” p. 13.

Note 38 in page 1102 The references made by the actor and X to a “passé de marbre” are part of a total, or enveloping past that X asserts (X narrates the film in the past tense). This past is that of death as well, but does not affect the acted present time of the film, which is static and timeless in the sense described. See Robbe-Grillet: “Pourquoi chercher à reconstituer le temps des horloges dans un récit qui ne s'inquiète que de temps humain? N'est-il plus sage de penser à notre propre mémoire, qui n'est jamais chronologique” (Pour un nouveau roman, p. 150). All memory is past, but inside that frame it is timeless.

Note 39 in page 1102 “Introduction,” p. 15.

Note 40 in page 1102 Selected Writings, p. 522.

Note 41 in page 1102 Selected Writings, p. 517.

Note 42 in page 1102 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 165.

Note 43 in page 1102 Lectures, p. 188.

Note 44 in page 1102 Lectures, pp. 104–05.

Note 45 in page 1103 See particularly the garden scene (The Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Roger L. Green, London, 1965), p. 129.

Note 46 in page 1103 L'Année dernière à Marienbad, p. 172.

Note 47 in page 1103 So Robbe-Grillet comments on “l'architecture labyrinthique (glaces, colonnes, etc.) caractéristique de l'hôtel” (Marienbad, p. 169) and states that “l'effet de labyrinthe est augmenté par la présence de glaces monumentales, qui renvoient d'autres perspectives de passages compliqués. . . on essaie plusieurs routes pour trouver une issue” (p. 98).

Note 48 in page 1103 Parallel French text, Marienbad, pp. 30, 31.

Note 49 in page 1103 Parallel French text, Marienbad, p. 36.

Note 50 in page 1104 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 21; Le Monde interview with Robbe-Grillet, 13 May 1961.

Note 51 in page 1104 See Le Monde interview; Pour un nouveau roman, pp. 147–49.

Note 52 in page 1104 Both essays are reprinted in Pour un nouveau roman.

Note 53 in page 1104 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 114.

Note 54 in page 1104 “Chaque homme, à son tour, doit réinventer les choses autour de lui” (Pour un nouveau roman, p. 119).

Note 55 in page 1104 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 78.

Note 56 in page 1104 Ben F. Stoltzfus, Alain Robbe-Grillet and the French New Novel (Carbondale, 111., 1964), pp. 102–21, realizing this, tries to save the film for chosisme theory by depicting A and X as “wrong,” tragically committing the error of anthropomorphizing objects, etc., which has the odd effect of claiming that Robbe-Grillet has written a deliberately pre-nouveau roman in order to follow his theory of the nouveau roman.

Note 57 in page 1104 See Le Sage, The French New Novel, p. 35: “Robbe-Grillet has openly repudiated the metaphor”; Pour un nouveau roman, pp. 59–60.

Note 58 in page 1104 The Autobiography, p. 276. Cf. Robbe-Grillet's admiration for the gratuitous conventionality of Roussel.

Note 59 in page 1104 Lectures, p. 188. Hoffman, The Mortal No, p. 360, writes of her as inspiring other writers “to do justice to the object and to give it in isolation from any and all presupposed manners of defining it.”

Note 60 in page 1105 Lectures, p. 188.

Note 61 in page 1105 Lectures, p. 189.

Note 62 in page 1105 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 177.

Note 63 in page 1105 See Lectures, p. 188.

Note 64 in page 1105 Gertrude Stein, p. 13.

Note 65 in page 1105 Pour un nouveau roman, p. 77.

Note 66 in page 1105 Pour un nouveau roman, pp. 112–13.

Note 67 in page 1105 Thus I consider as impossible such a situation as Stoltzfus describes: “Words in literature, as language, have always stood between the perceiver and the symbolized percepta, while Robbe-Grillet's objects, as things and images, come to us through word-images rather than word-ideas” [Alain Robbe-Grillet, pp. 109–10).

Note 68 in page 1105 In Eisenstein's October (1927) the repeated scene of the dead girl's hair being drawn across the drawbridge opening represents a possibility Eisenstein never explored further, and of course could not have explored once the official attitude against “formalism” had hardened (cf. the Cahiers “Entretien,” p. 12, where Robbe-Grillet is asked about the “formalism” of Marienbad). Bunuel's El angel exterminador (1962) has a remarkable use of repeated acts and speeches, mainly to emphasize the absurd.