347

ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET :
A QUESTION OF SELF-DECEPTION ?

Alain Robbe-Grillet is a literary draughtsman with a penchant for psycho-

logical case-studies. The eyes of his protagonists make inventories of their
surroundings with a meticulousness bordering on pedantry ; yet they are
charged with intense emotion. And so the reader is apt to respond almost
simultaneously in two quite different ways : he is bored, and fascinated.

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He may be wearied by those minute descriptions of landscapes and buildings
and objects—forms invested, it would seem, with only a miaimum of human
interest. But then his attention is drawn, and at least half-focussed, by an
obsessive tension whose precise nature and source it is difficult for him to
locate.
It is possible to some extent to localise this tension by charting the
fascination felt by the chief protagonist in each of the novels for some central
object. There is the rubber in Les Cbmmes ; the form of eight and its principal
derivative, the rolled chord, in Le Voyeur; the centipede in La Jalousie ;
and the box in Dans le Labyrinthe. But such a reading would treat only one
side of a polarity. Only an explanation of what I have called Robbe-Grillet's
literary draughtsmanship can yield an understanding of that ambivalence
which is essential to his art : an ambivalence both in the reader's reaction
—the relation between his fascination and his bordeom—and in the novelist
himself—the relation between the psyohologist-novelist and the draughtsman-
novenst.
Of the latter a critio once remarked wrily that he wrote as if he were
trying to compete with the land-registry. He might have had in mind a
passage such as this :
La lampe est en cuivre jaune et verre incolore. Sur son socle carr6
s'eleve une tige oylindrique a cannelures, supportant le reservoir—
demi-sphere a convexity dirigee vers le bas. Ce reservoir est a moitie
plein d'un liquide brunatre, qui ne ressemble guere au p6trole du
commerce. A sa partie supeiieure se trouve une collerette en m6tal
decoupe, haute de deux doigts, ou s'engage le verre—simple tube sans
renflement, legerement elargi a la base. C'est cette collerette ajouree,
vivement eclairee de l'interieur, que Ton distingue le mieux, dans
toute la pi6ce. Elle est constitute par deux series superposees de
cercles 6gaux accoles entre eux—d'anneaux, plus exactement, puis-
qu'ils sont 6vid6s—chaque anneau de la rang6e sup^rieure se situant
au-des8us d'un anneau de la rangee infSrieure, auquel il est dgalement
soud6 sur trois ou quatre millimetres.1
This occurs in Robbe-Grillet's second novel, Le Voyeur; in it we share
the point of view of the main protagonist, Mathias. It is a kind of geometrical
1
Alain Bobbe-Qrillet, Le Voyeur (Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1956), p. 226.
 348

field—angular, inorganic, quantified, with a scrupulous delimitation of the

forms of objects and an extreme precision of localisation—which is to occur
frequently as the object of Mathias' attention. But that idiosyncracy is not
primarily his. The husband in La Jalousie registers what he sees with an
equal precision : the juxtaposition of chairs on the veranda, the situation
of windows and doors in his house, the arrangement of cutlery at mealtimes,
the shifting angles of sunlight and shadow, and even the organisation of
banana trees in a nearby plantation—whether the groups of trees are rect-
angles or trapezoids or irregular and indented, and how many trees there
are in each row. Once more, in the town which forms the setting for Dans
le Labyrinthe, with its roads which are all alike, its regular crossroads, its

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identical rows of buildings ; in the town explored by the detective, Wallas,
in Les Oommes ; and in the formalised garden of L'Annie Dernitre a Marien-
bad—this geometrical landscape appears again. Incessantly, the mind seeks
a catalogue of objects, a universe filled with nouns ; the gaze turns to con-
template things without uncertain depths, forms reducible to precise, flat-
tened outlines.

I should like to suggest an explanation for this. Before doing so, how-
ever, I shall review the interpretations offered by Robbe-Grillet himself.
These are sometimes misleading and even contradictory ; nevertheless, they
raise issues and point to motives which must be in some way unified in
any complete picture of his work.
These theoretical writings fall, roughly speaking, into two periods. His
early position—best represented by two essays, " Une Voie pour le Roman
Futur " (1956) and " Nature, Humanisme, Tragedie " (1958)—is significantly
modified in later expositions, particularly in " Temps et Description dans
le Recit d'Aujourd-Hui " (1963) and " Du Realisme a la R4alite " (1965).
In the first period he claims that his main concern is to purge descriptive
language, so far as possible, of all anthropological implications. In the
second, however, he chiefly emphasizes the subjectivity of his descriptions.2
The early theories attack the literary expression of an empathic relation-
ship between man and his environment—the attempt to seek for something
beyond a purely material description. For example, a novelist may speak
of a stone as " indifferent " or a mountain as " majestic ". But then he
may begin to believe that the stone is indifferent, that the mountain is
majestic. For a metaphor is never an innocent expression. It may furnish
indications about the physical properties of things ; but it always does more
than this. When, for instance, a novelist speaks of a village as " nestled "
in the fold of a valley, he is no longer wholly a spectator ; at least for the
duration of that sentence, he, and with him the reader, becomes the village ;
they feel themselves into its situation; and this leads them eventually to
•Alain Robbe-Gnllet, Pour «n Nouveau Roman (Paris, Les Editions de Admit,
1963).
 349
suppose that the object of their attention is something more than the purely
material thing that it in fact is. But then the novelist may decide to abandon
these illicit pathetic fallacies. Let us suppose that he now firmly believes
the universe to be indifferent to his feelings and values. No matter : he
may still be seduced by his metaphorical conceits and fall, as did Sartre
and Camus, from dootrinal purity. For if Sartre in La Nausie asoribes
viscosity to the world that is because, for him, this is no mere material
attribute but possesses moral and metaphysical qualities. And if Roquen-
tin's gaze is drawn by the ambiguities of colour—the restaurant manager's
braces, the root of the chestnut tree—it is because they evoke sensations
analogous to those of touch : by their equivocation, their refusal to be classi-

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fied, they seem to manifest a personality. Thus Roquentin's " nausea " is
really a " morbid solidarity " between himself and things ; and it is for this
reason that he can say that " All objects surrounding me are made of the
same matter as myself, a sort of rotten suffering " ; or again, " I was the
root of the ohestnut-tree."
But the world, says Robbe-Grillet, is neither significant nor absurd ; it
is simply there. It offers no sympathetic counterparts to our sensations,
but neither is it nauseous. The novelist must therefore be content to appre-
hend the material surfaces of things. He may register the measurements
and shape of an object, and the distance between the protagonist and the
object, and between this object and other objects. And he must accord to
sight a privileged status among the senses, and particularly sight as it
appb'es itself to contours rather than to colours, as it measures, situates,
limits and establishes distances. For sight—he argues—is the most rational
of the senses ; and it is only by virtue of this that it can maintain an appro-
priate distance between man and things.
Here, it would appear, lies the primary intention behind Robbe-Grillet's
literary draughtsmanship. But this is complemented by a second pro-
position ; and one which, though implied in the early essays, is never ex-
pounded at length and whose relation to the first is nowhere satisfactorily
clarified. It concerns the use of psychological analysis in fiction.
Robbe-Grillet, like Nathalie Sarraute, must face the problem : how can
psychological investigation in depth be carried further after Proust ? On
two counts his answer is similar to hers. By an evolution similar to that
already accomplished in painting, both allow the psychological element,
like the pictorial element, to free itself from the object—the individual
personality—of which it was formerly a part, and to become increasingly
self-sufficient; so that their characters are not so much flesh and blood
human beings as carriers of still unexplored states of consciousness. In the
second place, both reject Proustian analysis. Robbe-Grillet thinks the
categories of the conscious intelligence fundamentally distort the feelings
and gestures which they claim to explain ; by wrapping the hero's behaviour
inside the envelope of his own interpretations, the novelist prevents the
" presence " of actions and feelings from striking the reader with sensory
 350
immediacy. Nathalie Sarraute makes a similar point more tellingly. Proust,
she says, uncovered minutiae ; but he observed them only from a great
distance after they had run their course and found, refracted in memory,
a measure of repose ; and further, by seeking to deduce general principles
from his observations, he failed to grasp directly psychic movements in
their initial stages of formation. She wishes, therefore, to mediate the
sensation of such movements ; to give the reader the filing of living through
a multitude of tiny, personal dramas which develop and lead on, by a
mysterious, swaying, indeterminate motion, towards unforeseeable endings ;
of being plunged into the stream of those subterranean dramas of which
Proust obtained only a distant aerial view.

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It is at this point that Robbe-Grillet diverges from Nathalie Sarraute.
He rejects any idea of " excavating " in " depth ", of penetrating deeper
and deeper and then bringing to light tiny fragments of psychio life from
some ever more intimate stratum. Here, too, he will cleave only to surfaces.
He wishes to reproduce, as precisely as possible, certain appearances : the
action, the gesture, the field of vision which, in a particular situation, the
protagonist's state of mind leads him to perform or to perceive. The reader
may then, if he wishes, piece together the behaviour patterns of the hero; but
this he must do without recourse to interpretative comment on the part
of the novelist. It is he, and not the author, who is to be the analyst.
Robbe-Grillet's theoretical attitudes thus relate both to the description
of the external world and to the portrayal of mental activity. His position
is a response, on the one side, to Sartre and Camus, and on the other, to
Proust and Nathalie Sarraute. In both cases he rejects the attempt to
penetrate appearances : he wishes to give such a direct and unfiltered ex-
perience of man's environment that there should no longer be any psychology
or metaphysics with which to approach and interpret the objective setting
in which the protagonist finds himself.
However, this theoretical position is not a consistent one. In later
formulations his aim of freeing objeots from the projection of human emotion
becomes increasingly suspect. Thus, in 1961, we find him stressing that
" subjectivity " is the essential characteristic of the new novel; that hia
protagonists are the least neutral or impartial of observers and are always
engaged in a passionate and obsessive enterprise ; and that, under the
pressure of such experience, their vision of things becomes so distorted as
to produce delusions bordering on delirium. But this opens up a tension
between the two projects he has set himself : a tension between, on the one
hand, a truly materialistic rediscovery of the object obtained by means of
a description as minute and objective as possible, and, on the other, the
portrayal of marginal states of mind, conditions which are marked at the
very least by an abnormal sense of confusion and might be exacerbated to
the point of hysteria. It is difficult to imagine how a man in such a con-
dition—a man like Mathias in Le Voyeur or the husband in La Jalouisc—
could fail to project onto the world around him the obsessions and delusions
to which he is subject.
 351
Wefinda tacit admission of this difficulty in Robbe-Grillet's later essays.
The terms in which he conduots his discussion have been notably changed.
He now regards the process of observation and the falsity of information
as his central themes. What is important, he now says, are the little details
that strike a false note : the unfinished, awkward gesture made by someone
passing by, which seems to lack either function or precise intention ; or the
object isolated from its purpose ; or a few words taken out of their context.
Tfia protagonist, not content with noting these unnatural details, busies
himself " inventing the things that surround him, and sees the things he is
inventing " : starting from some unimportant detail, he will invent a whole
landscape of lines and planes until these lines begin to contradict each other

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and the total image becomes uncertain. This ambiguity—an incessant pro-
cess of building which leaves nothing firm or permanent behind it—then
infects the novel at every level : there is a " twofold movement of getting
created and getting stuck ". And it is for this reason—Robbe-Grillet now
admits—that the interest and human significance of his descriptions derive
from their movement and not from their content.

We can watch this " twofold movement of getting created and getting
stuck ", for instance, both in the overall structure and in the particular
movements of Le Voyeur. Here we have the study of an unsuccessful but
ever-renewed flight from an insoluble problem. At its centre—in the break
between Part I and Part II of the narrative—there is a void. At the opening
of the novel, Mathias, a commercial traveller, lands on the island of his
birth; once he has disembarked, he hires a bicyole and goes off to sell his
wares. For some time his movements are clear ; then, at the end of Part I,
he arrives at a crossroads and takes a path towards the cliffs. When the
narrative begins again he is standing at the same crossroads and does not
seem at first able to remember what he has been doing. We later learn that,
during the gap in the action, a girl who had been looking after sheep on
the cliff-top has disappeared ; her body is later discovered at the bottom of
the cliff. We come to suspect that Mathias has committed a murder. Or,
if he is not guilty, he is at least the kind of man who might have committed
the crime; and he knows this, and so must bear the burden of negative
proof. From this time onwards, therefore, partly in conversation with
others and partly to himself, he tries retrospectively to fill up the empty
hour that has elapsed between the time at which he first passed the cross-
roads and the time at which he returned to the same place. He wishes to
give a plausible and complete account of his actions which would eliminate
all allusion to the murder—which he might have committed. But he is
unable to produce such an account; for he cannot know when, where, or
by whom he might have been seen, and he has an ever-growing conviction
of having been observed, yet without having absolute proof. He can produce
 352
flawed hypotheses—cannot indeed refrain from doing so—but no definitive
solution.
Moreover, his position is marred throughout by his inability to establish
contact with people. In this he is characteristic of all Eobbe-Grillet's pro-
tagonists. When occasionally they speak with others they converse only in
generalities and platitudes. Dialogue is for the most part stripped of its
conventional weight as conveying information or intention, as expressing
something ; it tends to become more an aural phenomenon, a succession of
sounds, than a means of communication. And, in precisely the same way,
what he sees of other people has an optical but scarcely any cognitive
definition. He notices the slightest of details : the movement of eyes and

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hands and fingers, the posture of a body or a head. But he can catch only
what is fragmented and physical : a gesture, a movement, a smile. Their
meaning and intention elude him. We are reminded of Proust's evocation of
the elderly academician, leaving the Institute and hailing a cab, as caught
by a photograph : it would show, he says, " his staggering gait, his pre-
caution to avoid tumbling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he
were drunk, or the ground frozen over ". That is to say, the photograph will
not indicate that this academician is to be thought of as dignified or un-
dignified ; it simply fails to tell us anything about his behaviour in general
or about his typical attitudes. Its mode of vision, like that of Mathias,
isolates, immobilizes, and renders almost wholly physical, a momentary
pose of some person in such a way that the function of this particular pose
within the total structure of his personality remains undisclosed. The pose
only is presented; its context is not given. Nor are moments of time ex-
perienced by Mathias within an explanatory context. For him, time is
never controlled and made safe either by an objective chronology or by a
firm introspective structure. The frequent use of temporal adverbs—main-
tenant, auparavant, plus tard, alors—always gives a false precision. For, in
fact, there is only one tense : piotures unfold in a perpetual present. And,
finally, the frequent introduction of qualification—peut-Ure, probablement,
etc.—disperses the air of certainty which might be felt at first to surround
only the tiniest detail, the smallest, most verifiable fact; here too there is
constantly the suggestion of a doubt, a discrepancy, a false note.
Thus the hero's attention is occupied for much of the time by what is
false—by the possible, the impossible, a hypothesis, a lie. His mental shifts,
adjusting swiftly from one possibility to another, are for most of the time
propelled by an instinct of flight. This is so from the beginning. Le Voyeur
opens with a sequence of cut scenes : a view of the passengers staring at
the embankment, a little girl leaning against a pillar, a piece of string looped
into a figure eight, seagulls flying overhead, a packet of cigarettes floating
on the surface of the water. The girl's posture is singular : standing against
a pillar, her legs are braced and sb'ghtly spread, her head leans on the pillar.
Each time Mathias later notices a girl she will be in a similar position. But
he now evades the little girl's look by examining more closely the piece of
 353
string. Yet this, and the other ohjects, are neither innocent nor gratuitous.
It so happens that he notices the string ; hut it is hardly fortuitous that he
should then associate it, in a memory flashback, with the pieces of string
he used to keep in his shoebox as a boy. Such objects, to which his attention
repeatedly returns, provide the stimuli for his compulsive desires. But he
does not linger long over them. Constantly shifting, his gaze then turns
towards a geometrical field—to the cluster of lines and angles formed by
the landing slip as the ship approaches the harbour. And as his eyes traverse
these he is able for a time to forget what he has just seen, remembered, or
imagined, and to become wholly absorbed in this new visual field. In this
alternate movement of fascination and flight he succeeds, for some periods
of time, in displacing from his awareness one set of scenes—the young girl,

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the string, the gull, the packet of cigarettes—by focussing upon an accumula-
tion of geometrical detail.
Sometimes, however, his doubt, always present but generalised and
spread out thin, rises to a crescendo of fear. Then his need to assuage it
becomes the more emphatic. This is what happens, for example, when he
scrutinizes, in seemingly disinterested absorption, the intricate structure of
a lamp. In fact, he first sees in fantasy a man and woman ; and then his
gaze moves with a quick and deceptive shift towards the lamp :
L'homme s'approche alors sans hate, se place derriere elle, reste un
instant la contempler, avance la main, caresse la nuque du bout des
doigts, longuement. Sont aligned sur une me"me oblique : la grande
main, la t&te blonde, la lampe a p^trole, le bord de la premiere assiette
(du c6t6 droit), le montant gauche de la fenetre.3
It is only now that we are given the minute description of the lamp. Here,
then, we see reproduced, only at increased speed and in a more simple and
linear fashion, that movement of the mind seeking refuge which we have
already observed in the opening scene where Mathias arrives on the island.
The first sentence has suggested the beginning of some terrifying crime :
Mathias' feelings must be relieved by an abrupt yet surreptitious transition,
accomplished in the middle of the next sentence ; so that his feelings may
drain off in the contemplation of details sufficiently hard and precise to
contain them. Here, too, as in the earlier passage, Mathias' eyes traverse
each nucleus of geometrical possibilities with assiduity and a kind of lingering
gratitude because he instinctively senses that, for some obscure reason, it
is precisely such details, such structures, that might provide him with the
most effective evasion of the pressures that bear upon him, the chance of
emptying them, for a time at least, completely from his consciousness.

But why is it that an environment so structured—a cluster of geometrical

designs—answers so effectively his need for evasion 1 I think we might
profitably generalise the question and ask : in what circumstances would
anyone desire to see the world in this way ?
» Le Voyeur, pp. 226-226.
 354
For a similar question was asked, half a century ago, by the German art
historian, Wilhelm Worringer. In proposing an answer, he was led to dis-
tinguish between two general attitudes of mind which find expression in
two types of artistic perception and style. The first of these—" Empathy "
(EinfuMung)—arises out of a basic trust in man's relationship with his
environment and implies a self-affirmation and a positive delight and
participation in the organic world. The other—" Abstraction "—arises out
of the attempt to escape from the disorder and instability of the immediate
environment byfindingrefuge in the regularity of a world of rigid, inorganio
forms.4
Now, in this latter case, a man, in confronting the world, will be conscious

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primarily of a feeling of strangeness. His surroundings will be experienced
as resistant and puzzling. And so, confused by the arbitrariness and flux
of phenomena, he will be driven by an immense need for tranquillity, by
an urge for the creation of something fixed, clear and absolute, which might
deliver him from the perplexity of his mental impressions. He will replace
casual perceptual images by fixed conceptual images. He will attempt to
wrest the individual object out of the seeing fortuitousness of its natural
context, to divest it of obscurity by imparting to it a new regularity, to
purify it of temporality by making it as far as possible independent both of
its immediate surroundings and of the spectator. In thus freeing the object
—as by a kind of exorcism—from its disquieting environment, he will
reduce the varying modes of its appearance to certain recurrent character-
istics. Seeking the purest embodiments of necessity and inevitability, he
will find them above all in the rigid line and its elaborations. For here at
least, it would seem, the last vestige of dependence on life is erased. And
so, intuitively, he seeks in the geometrical possibilities of line—triangles,
squares, cubes, circles, parallels—the most regular and permanent things
he can find, an escape from impennanence.
We can take this thesis—the urge to geometrical stylisation as an escape
from disorder through the contemplation of inert forms—not in the context
in which it was originally offered by Worringer, but more simply, in a more
limited way, as a diagnosis of one type of interest in geometric form. It is
in this sense, I would suggest, that his model is helpful in reading Robbe-
Grillet.
For indeed, the opening paragraphs of his first novel, Lea Oommea, read
remarkably like a concrete illustration of the polarity of which Worringer
was speaking :
Dans la penombre de la salle de cafe le patron dispose les tables
et les chaises, les cendriers, les siphons d'eau gazeuse ; il est six heures
du matin.
H n'a pas besoin de voir clair, il ne sait m6me pas ce qu'il fait.
H dort encore. De trla anciennes lots rlglent le ddiail de ses gestes,
eauvia pour une foia du floUement dea intentions humainea; chaque
4
Wilhelm Wornnger, Abstraction und EinfCMung (Mttnohen, B. Piper & Co. Verlag,
Neuausgabe, 1960).
 355
seconde marque un pur mouvement : un pas de c6te\ la chaise a
trente centimetres, trois coups de torchon, demi-tour a droite, deux
pas en avant, chaque seconde marque, parfaite, 6gale, sans bavure.
Trente et un. Trente-deux. Trente-trois. Trente-quatre. Trente-
cinq. Trente-six. Trente-sept. Chaque seoonde a sa place exacte.
Bientdt malheureusement le temps ne sera plus le mattre. Envelopp^s
de leur cerne d'erreur et de doute, les evdnements de cette journde,
si minimes qu'ils puissent 6tre, vont dans quelques instants com-
mencer leur besogne, entamer progrtssivement I'ordonnance idiak,
introduire ca et 14, sournoisement, une inversion, un d6calage, une
confusion, une courbure, pour accomplir peu a peu leur oeuvre: un jour,
au d£but de Phiver, sans8 plan, sans direction, incomprehensible et
monstnieux. (My italics)

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The events of this day in early winter—or of any day in Robbe-Grillet's
novels—will shatter this pristine order, at first so pure, automatic and un-
breakable ; and it will always be the aim of the protagonists to build some-
thing recognizably like this " ideal order ", and to protect it, by an ever-
renewed inventiveness, against the discrepancies and warps that constantly
threaten it. This is why, as the novelist himself puts it, his universe is
perceived in a " twofold movement of getting created and getting stuck " ;
it is why his protagonists are forever caught up in the equivocal enterprise
of inventing the things that surround them.

Their strategy, in doing this, is careful and consistent. It begins with

the sentence itself. In face of a pervasive epistemological doubt, there is
yet, in these sentences, a powerful impulse to admit of no doubt. There is
an effort to prevent the object of their scrutiny from cracking or splitting or
otherwise coming apart beneath their touch. They do not rush forward or
explode in many different directions or sway about; they lack that constant
and rather hectic plasticity which wefind,for example, in Sartre's La Nausie.
or in Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes, or the more tranquil and congealed
convolutions of Proust. They try, on the contrary, to eradicate all disorder.
With a stiff care, they endeavour to immobilize and conscribe their object
and to confer upon it outlines that contain it perfectly and within which it
will neither move nor become blurred.
Then again they take care that the world should be mediated as far as
possible by the sight. If in his intercourse with the environment Mathias
were to rely too heavily on the other senses—on touch, for instance—he
would run the danger, as Roquentin did, of exposing himself to the fugitive
quality of his perceptions from moment to moment. It would then be difficult
for him to extract a sense of the enduring qualities of things from the flow
of his own sensations about them. For each perceived quality might be
only the dissolving point of passage in the transition from preceding sensa-
tions to subsequent ones, and at every moment he would be conscious of the
»Alain Robbe-Grillet, Let Qommes (Pana, Les Editions de Minuit, 1053), p. 1.
 356
partiality and incompleteness of the information he was acquiring. On the
other hand, by relying so heavily on sight, he is able to moderate the tran-
sience of his perceptions, to detach a sense of the persisting and independent
existence of things from the flux of his own apprehensions. Though he
requires time in order properly to scan a field of vision, he is able to feel, to
some extent at least, that what he surveys stays as it is unchanged while it
is being surveyed. And so the time he needs in order to comprehend a
field of vision is not so much felt as a passing away of old contents before
new ones, but rather as a process of identifying stable contents, a process
of retention. Only sight offers him this possibility of accumulating a set of
enduring forms.

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However, this in itself is not enough. For the little girl, the piece of
string, thefingernails,the packet of cigarettes are also seen. It is necessary
for Mathias to dam back the arbitrariness that inheres even in the visual
world by reducing the varying modes of its appearance to certain recurrent
and, as it were, anonymous features. Lines and angles provide him with
firm resting-points as distinct as possible from the disturbing resonance of
certain recurring images. For each line, by virtue of its rigidity, yields a
sensation of closure, even of finality ; while at the same time each line leads
on to another, and then another, opening up before his view a seemingly
continuous series of cherished linear possibilities. The more these forms are
reduced to a number of self-contained and classified patterns, the more
emphatic is their ability to endure. Thus the geometricisation of shapes, by
presenting the ideals of constancy and enclosure in their most extreme
sensible form, seem to represent the ultimate refinement of what sight alone
among the senses can offer.
Yet it is possible to go beyond even this. At first, Mathias surveys the
grouping of lines at the end of the pier, and the variations of amplitude and
rhythm as the sea rises and falls in the sheltered angle formed by the landing
slip. But the information he gathers still falls into disconnected clusters.
When, however, he decides to take a mark against the embankment, shaped
like a figure eight, as " a good point of reference ", he has already grasped
a further possible refinement of his procedure. He is now attempting, as it
were, to raise his geometricised world to a higher level by integrating separate
pieces of information and diverse groupings of lines and angles into systematic
wholes. He will end by making maps of bis surroundings and diagrams of
his actions. It is in this way that he transforms the problem immediately
confronting him when he arrives on the island—how can he dispose of the
watches in his trunk in the short period of time between the arrival of the
boat and the return trip later on the same day ?—into a purely mathematical
puzzle. He says : let it be assumed that the distance between the houses on
the island and the speed of the bicycle will always be the same ; let it be
further assumed that the time required to make his sales will in each case
be identical; and let the island have x square kilometres and y houses per
square kilometre. Thus, not content with accentuating certain possibilities
 357
of line and measurement inherent in his surroundings, he begins to construct
ideal sketches with which such surroundings might be compared. Nor is he
alone in this : the husband in La Jalousie expends a good deal of mental
energy attempting to calculate the number and trace the arrangement of
trees in a nearby banana plantation. These ideal puzzles are cocoons in
which they seek to escape their uncertainty.
Thus the hero's attention shuttles incessantly from the real, to the
remembered, to the imagined ; it is often impossible to tell whether what
happens takes place " today " or " yesterday " or " tomorrow " ; and in
this process the customary distinction between levels of reality—between,
on the one hand, what is really experienced, and, on the other, what is

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merely dreamt or imagined—is collapsed. But this does not finally reduce
all experience to the flat sameness of a single plane. By his fastidious atten-
tion to detail and his construction of formalised patterns which gradually
dissociate themselves from the natural forms they ostensibly describe, the
protagonist gropes towards the erection of a new hierarchy. This gradation
of the data present to the consciousness moves upwards from the realm of
individualised objects, to the level of anonymous geometrical structures, and
finally to that of abstract puzzles. Perception is a progressive exorcism of
the irregular and the capricious : experience aspires to the perfect, closed
state—the innocence—of theorems.
Yet these finally enclosed structures are no more enduring than the im-
mediately perceived lines and angles which they attempt to raise to a higher
level. Even purely constructed forms are laden with uncertainty—because
they are false—and irregularity cannot be erased by counting. A sudden
rise in the water level causes the mark, chosen by Mathias as a " good point
of reference ", to disappear ; he forces himself to keep his eyes on the same
place for several seconds, and then he sees it again—but he is not quite
sure that he is now looking at the same mark. In the same way he can never
satisfactorily explain away the empty hour ; nor can the scrutiny of the
husband in La Jalousie ever finally contain, or be contained by, the contours
of his house and the nearby plantation. Contingency breaks in upon their
abstract speculations ; and from this there is set up a shuttling movement
along a line whose poles are the extremes of contingency and abstraction.
Locked in this condition of friction, the protagonist is unable either to
carry through to completion, or to abandon completely, his urge to reduce
the disturbing confusion of his experience to the internal coherence and
self-containedness of geometrical figures.

This is, surely, the same self-containedness of which Roquentin also had
fleeting intimations. His nausea—produced by the indiscreet closeness of
things which swarm and burst their boundaries—reveals to him the formless-
ness and gratuitousness of existence. If you don't pay attention to objects,
he tells us, you might believe that they are simple and reassuring, that there
 358
is a real blue and a real red ; but as soon as you focus your gaze upon them
and try to hold onto them for an instant, and particularly if you touch
them, this feeling of comfort gives way to a deep uneasiness ; for colours,
tastes and smells are never themselves and nothing but themselves. Things
escape the scheme of references in which we try to enclose them ; existing
things never have the inoffensive air of abstract categories, and the names
he murmurs to himself lose all relationship with the objects he perceives.
Roquentin wishes he could experience things in some other way, as
logically necessary : like a mathematical figure, pure and clear. Or like his
favourite gramophone record, with its rigorous purity and inevitability,
which nothing in this world can either break or interrupt. And he aspires

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to the condition of the song on the record :
Et moi aussi j'ai voulu itre. Je n'ai meme voulu que cela; voila le
fin mot de ma vie : au fond de toutes ces tentatives qui semblaient
sans liens, je retrouve le mSme desir : chasser l'existence hors de moi,
vider les instants de leur graisse, les tordre, les assecher, me purifier,
me durcir, pour rendre enfinle son net et precis d'une note de saxo-
phone.6
Thus he is attraoted by the physical qualities of hardness, dryness and order
—a spectrum of attributes defining necessity as against contingency. But
he also realises, as he looks at the root of the chestnut tree, that there is no
half-way point between this ideal mode of being and the world of everyday
reality :
Je compris qu'il n'y avait pas de milieu entre l'inexistence et cette
abondance pamee. Si Ton existait, il fallait exister jusque-ld,, jusqu'a
la moisissure, a la boursouflure, a l'obscenite. Dans un autre monde,
les ceroles, les airs de musique gardent leurs lignes pures et rigides.
Mais l'exjstence est un flechissement . . . De trop : c'etait le seul
rapport que je pusse etablir entre ces arbres, ces grilles, ces cailloux.
En vain cherchais-je a compter les marronniers, et les situer par rapport
a la Velleda, a comparer leur hauteur avec celle des platanes : chacun
d'eux s'6chappait des relations ou je cherchais a renfermer, s'isolait,
debordait. Ces relations (que je m'obstinais a maintenir pour retarder
l'ecroulement du monde humain, des mesures, des quantites, des
directions) j'en sentais l'arbitraire ; elles ne mordaient plus sur les
choses.7
Robbe-Grillet's protagonists refuse to recognize what Roquentin here
reluctantly acknowledges. Their arbitrary, stylised world is the precipitate
of a meticulous evasion, not of a faithful delineation : never daring to en-
visage the collapse of their shaky human world of measures, quantities and
bearings, they hold their surroundings at a distance and try to endow them
with the properties of a mathematical figure.
It is for this reason, I think, that we can quite properly discuss Robbe-
Grillet's novels in terms derived from Sartre. Indeed, he himself implicitly
invoked these terms in his article " Nature, Humanisme, Tragedie ", when
he spoke of the irreducible otherness of things : in effect, he proposed to
• J. P. Sartre, La Nausie (Paris, Editions Gallomard, 1938), pp. 244-245.
e, p. 181.
 359
take more strictly than Sartre himself the Sartrean distinction between
" fitre-pour-soi " and " fitre-en-soi ", consciousness and things. Later, as
we have seen, he explicitly admitted that in his novels the objects of con-
sciousness were subjected to the radically inventive manipulations of his
protagonists ; while at the same time they too, and the people they encounter,
appear thing-like. But that does not render the Sartrean context irrelevant :
quite the contrary. Hia novels can be read as illustrations of that " mauvaise
foi " which Sartre so penetratingly exposed in L'£tre et le Niant. Sartre
was there concerned to show how our consciousness, threatened by a free-
floating anxiety, was attracted by the finite durability of inanimate things
and tried to sink into the self-contained mode of being of a thing. A man

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might be afraid of himself, his instincts, his responsibilities ; of solitude, of
change, of society. He wants to nip these anxieties in the bud—to become
all outside, not to examine himself, to run away from the intimate awareness
he has of himself. In this way he might attain that complete coincidence
with itself which characterises, for instance, a stone.
Robbe-Grillet is in fact studying a sub-species of this condition. Indeed,
the fact that all his protagonists are in an essentially marginal situation
lends weight to the suspicion that the terms in which Sartre tries to charac-
terise everybody are most suitably applicable to those cut off from the
normal modes of experience and behaviour. For Robbe-Grillet's novels
show us the struggle of selfhood—" fitre-pour-sbi "—as it aspires to the
state of thinghood—" fitre-en-soi ". Or at least, if the protagonist cannot
properly attain this condition—which would only be possible if he ceased
to be conscious—he can at least contract his consciousness and foous his
gaze upon the purest embodiments of " fitre-en-soi " which he can find in
the world around him Only whereas of course Sartre invests the realm of
self-sufficient objects with the imagery of viscosity, density and softness,
Robbe-Grillet sees there quite other qualities : that is to say, rigidity,
angularity and hardness. At the same time, the twofold movement of his
descriptions—their " getting created and getting stuck "—reproduces the
fundamental flaw which Sartre detected in the condition of bad faith :
when we lie not to others but to ourselves the same thing is both recognized
and hidden, known and masked. Because of this I cannot help but be con-
scious of the self-deception with which I infect myself; my lie collapses
under the weight of my own awareness, ruined from behind, as it were, by
the very consciousness of my lying to myself. It is therefore vital that I
should veil this awareness of my deception, as far as possible, from myself.
That is why Robbe-Grillet's heroes systematically refrain from analysing
their condition—they would do anything save talk about it to themselves.
It is here, surely, that the novelist's two theoretical projects find their
point of unity : here the draughtsman's universe and the refusal to employ
the tools of introspective analysis are in harmony. And it is from this base
also that, from the standpoint of the reader, the polarity of boredom and
fascination is derived.
PAUL COITNBBTON
Cambridge