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A Novel of Objective Subjectivity: le Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Ben F. Stoltzfus
Ben F. Stoltzfus*
Affiliation:
University of California Riverside
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Extract

During an interview with Jacques Brenner, published in Arts (March 1953), Robbe-Grillet asserted that Les Gommes is a descriptive and scientific novel. In January 1959, in an interview with Denise Bourdet, Robbe-Grillet stated that “l'observation scientifique consiste à décrire sans interpréter, à ne jamais donner une signification aux choses.” His novels are noteworthy indeed for their absence of analysis, and readers familiar with his descriptive method will have no difficulty concluding that if Les Gommes is a “scientific novel,” so also are Le Voyeur, La Jalousie, and Dans le labyrinthe. But in what way are these novels “scientific”? Is Robbe-Grillet initiating a “new realism” as has been suggested, or is it more accurately a new naturalism? If we may be permitted to define naturalism as a realism with scientific pretensions, and if we apply the rigorous pattern of Freudian determinism—provided we accept Freud's method as “scientific”—to the psychic and mental operations of Mathias in Le Voyeur, and of the jealous husband in La Jalousie, then these novels would seem to qualify as naturalistic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1962 , pp. 499 - 507
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

1 Denise Bourdet, “Le Cas Robbe-Grillet,” La Revue de Paris, lxvi (1959), 132.

2 Robert Champigny, “In Search of the Pure Récit,” The American Society Legion of Honor Magazine, xxvii (Winter 1956–57), 338.

3 Roland Barthes, “Littérature littérale,” Critique, xii (1955), 823.

4 “In Search of the Pure Récit,” p. 339.

5 Ibid.

6 Alain Robbe-Grillet, “L'Année dernière à Marienbad,” Réalités, No. 184 (1961), p. 98. See also “Roman et Cinéma: Le Cas Robbe-Grillet,” by Bruce Morrissette, Symposium xv (1961), 85–104.

7 Claude Sarraute, “La Subjectivité est la caractéristique du roman contemporain,” Le Monde, 11–17 May 1961, p. 7.

8 “Lorsque j'ai découvert Kafka et la littérature américaine d'entre les deux guerres,” says Robbe-Grillet, “j'ai eu le sentiment qu'il fallait avancer dans cette voie.” André Bourin, “Techniciens du roman,” Nouvelles Littéraires, 22 Jan. 1959, p. 1.

9 Superficially, Robbe-Grillet's novels would seem to be detective stories since Les Gommes uses a detective, Wallas, to solve the alleged murder. In Le Voyeur a murder does take place, and the reader is, in essence, asked to solve the crime. In La Jalousie the spying husband and the reader act as accomplice detectives. In Dans le labyrinthe, the reader is again asked to solve the meaning of the story. But Robbe-Grillet's novels do not fit the classic stereotype of detective novels or “whodunits.” In the pure detective novel all are suspect, the murderer is finally uncovered and retribution is paid.

10 Roland Barthes, “Littérature objective,” Critique, x (1954), 581–591.

11 Colette Audry, “La Caméra d'Alain Robbe-Grillet,” La Revue des lettres modernes, v (1958), 267. “Le regard que posent sur la jetée le héros du Voyeur ou sur le dos de sa femme le mari de la Jalousie est un regard sans arrière-fond, à fleur de paupière, c'est le regard déshumanisé, désensibilisé, objectai en un mot, d'une simple lentille de verre, d'un pur objectif.”

12 “Notes sur la localisation et les déplacements du point de vue dans la description romanesque,” La Revue des lettres modernes, v (1958), 258.

13 “Oedipus and Existentialism: Les Gommes of Robbe-Grillet,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, i (1960), 43–74.

14 Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Techniciens du roman,” p. 4.

15 “Littérature objective,” p. 582.

16 “Les matériaux sont associés les uns aux autres par une sorte de hasard indifférent.” “Littérature littérale,” p. 822.

17 “La Subjectivité est la caractéristique du roman contemporain,” p. 7.

18 “Les objets … font le crime, elles ne le livrent pas: en un mot, elles sont littérales. Le roman de Robbe-Grillet reste donc parfaitement extérieur à un ordre psychanalytique.” “Littérature littérale,” p. 823.

19 Le Voyeur (Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1955), p. 32. Future references to this edition will appear within the body of the text.

20 Claude Mauriac, L'Alittérature contemporaine (Paris, 1958), p. 233.

21 L'Aurore, 5 July 1955, as quoted by Esprit in “Dix romanciers …,” July-August 1958, p. 28.

22 L'Alittérature contemporaine, p. 237.

23 “Nouveau Réalisme?” La NEF, xv (1958), p. 67.

24 NNRF, July 1955, as quoted by Esprit in “Dix romanciers …,” July-August 1958, p. 28.

25 “La Caméra d'Alain Robbe-Grillet,” p. 262.

26 “Plan du labyrinthe de Robbe-Grillet,” Les Temps modernes, xvi (1960), 158.

27 Cahiers du Sud, July 1955, as quoted by Esprit in “Dix romanciers …,” July-August 1958, p. 27.

28 “Description et infraconscience chez Alain Robbe-Grillet,” NRF, vii (1960), 890–900.

29 Bruce Morrissette, “Vers une écriture objective: ‘Le Voyeur’ de Robbe-Grillet,” Saggi e ricerche di letteratura francese (Milan, Feltrinelli, 1961), pp. 267–298. See also Hazel E. Barnes, “The Ins and Outs of Alain Robbe-Grillett,” Chicago Review, xv (1962), 21–43.

30 Though in her article on “Jalousie: New Blinds or Old,” Yale French Studies, No. 24, p. 90, Germaine Brée says that “Jalousie appears to be a strictly controlled form of the traditional ‘psychological novel’.” Bruce Morrissette, in an article on “La Jalousie” in Critique, July 1959, demonstrates most conclusively that this novel is “subjective” and that it is, as Germaine Brée states, a variant of the traditional French psychological novel. These two critics, by stressing the significance of image patterns and recurrent associations in La Jalousie, have anticipated the genera] lines of my own analysis for Le Voyeur.

31 One of the most recent critics to acknowledge this “subjectivity,” à propos of L'Année dernière à Marienbad, is Claude Ollier in the October 1961 issue of the NRF. This work, says Ollier, “se propose de restituer … la réalité du processus mental, la vérité de sa genèse et de son devenir, ou encore, comme disait André Breton, ‘le fonctionnement réel de la pensée’.” See also Yvonne Guers, “La Technique romanesque chez Alain Robbe-Grillet,” FR, xxxv (1962), 570–577.

32 “Une Voie pour le roman future,” NNRF, July 1956, pp. 80–81.

33 Faulkner's novels are one of the strongest literary influences on Robbe-Grillet. The Sound and the Fury, for instance, begins with Benjy watching golfers through a fence. The reader does not know, and he cannot know, upon first reading, that hitting golf balls, and Benjy's fascination with the activity of hitting, correspond to his castration and to his point of view. The second paragraph of Le Voyeur is, similarly, a capsule summary of Robbe-Grillet's own novel. The dislocations in chronology correspond to analogous shifts in time in Absalom, Absalom! Les Gommes emerges as a formal imitation of Sanctuary following Malraux's famous statement in the preface to the 1933 French translation: “Sanctuaire, c'est l'intrusion de la tragédie grecque dans le roman policier.” Wallas is therefore acting out a Freudian version of the Oedipus myth within the context of a detective story. Mathias, in Le Voyeur, like Ulysses, finds himself one morning on an island. Later in the day, after he has hurled Jacqueline into the ocean, the islanders allude to a mythological monster which comes out of the sea to devour a young girl. The Greek theme is less persistent and less obvious in Le Voyeur than in Les Gommes, in which, in addition to Faulkner's, we sense a Joycean influence. The presence of this theme in the first two novels (as Morrissette's Oedipal interpretation of Les Gommes reveals) suggests a modern mythological context. The sea-monster therefore seems to be Mathias' subconscious compulsive drive. It will be his “siren.” Reference to the myth generalizes Mathias' sexuality. By giving us the total picture of one man's psyche and by universalizing it Robbe-Grillet, like Joyce, has recreated a segment of the subconscious of his race.

34 “Plan du Labyrinthe de Robbe-Grillet,” p. 159.

35 “Le Réalisme, la psychologie et l'avenir du roman,” Critique, xiv (1956), 701.

36 “Vers une écriture objective: ‘Le Voyeur’ de Robbe-Grillet,” p. 293.

37 “In Search of the Pure Récit,” p. 338.