Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction

Author(s): Alain Robbe-Grillet and Bruce Morrissette

Source: Critical Inquiry , Autumn, 1977, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 1-20
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343039

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Artists on Art

Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Translated by Bruce Morrissette

EDITORS' NoTE.--During the week of 24-30 October 1976, Alain Robb

Grillet took part in the Festival of French Arts held at the University of Chicag
large group of musicians, actors, photographers, writers, and film makers w
sent by the French government in honor of the American Bicentennial. Ro
Grillet lectured on his fiction and film. He spoke without notes, and in transl
and editing his talk, we have tried to retain the colloquial force of the origi

The question of order and disorder in the narrative has bee

bothering me for some time. More and more I see its importance in
works, in the works of the contemporary world--even outside of lit
ture, in cinema, in painting, in music-but at the same time what
concerns me is the ambiguity, that is, the changing aspect, the shif
side of this question. And since I have not myself up to now tried to
form to a theoretical exercise on this question-that is, I have not wri
a critical essay on the problem-it is possible that I may lose my
along the path. But that is not important. I would even say that it wo
be better, since it would be in the very image of the project of
discourse in question.
You have no doubt noticed that, beginning with my first novels a
in all the novels that have followed, there are characters who are in
ested in creating order. They are often secondary characters, and th
activity might seem to be somewhat humorous (but one must bewar
humor since it is often what is most serious). In my first novel,
Gommes, there is a character called Garinati who arranges objects on
mantelpiece. He moves them about to try to find the best order, and
this kind of activity which continues from novel to novel with an a
tonishing persistence. Another character in La Maison de rendez-vous,
1

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2 Alain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder

of my latest novels, engages in a similar activity, all of a sudden

where along a page. I notice at the same time that this probl
bothered other authors of the Nouveau Roman. There is a no
Claude Ollier called Le Maintien de l'ordre; the American edition is
Law and Order. And there is a novel by Claude Simon which begi
this quotation taken from Paul Valery: "Two dangers threat
world: order and disorder"-an extremely interesting sentence, be
it shows me that these two dangers do not threaten only the nove
narrative, but threaten the world as a whole.
You certainly know the story of Goethe who, once enthusiasti
the French Revolution-which tried, of course, to overthrow esta
order-some years later found disorder so unendurable that he be
condemn what he had cherished a few years before. In 1968 ther
another, so-called, revolution in France which was quite astonishin
is, it developed suddenly, beginning at the universities and then e
ing to all milieux-among workers, among the bourgeoisie
throughout the population there developed in just a few weeks a
damental disorder. France as a whole was paralyzed by the refusa
the part of what seemed to be the whole mass of Frenchmen, to c
to maintain order. What ensued was inevitable-' a considerable amount
of chaos. And all very rapidly. In just a few weeks, the French econom
as a whole had come to a halt. And then, at that moment, General de
Gaulle thought of calling a referendum to find out what everyone
thought of this state of affairs; everyone was required to vote on whether
he preferred order or disorder. Now these were the same people, prob-
ably the same people, who could not endure order and who, at the
same time, when plunged into a disorder in which they no longer felt
themselves at ease, reacted. At that particular moment there was an
election which went more to the right than any that had taken place for
many years, precisely because this disorder had come to appear even

Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist, film maker, and essayist, is the author

ofLes Gommes (1953), Le Voyeur ( 1955), LaJalousie ( 1957), Dans le labyrinthe
(1959), La Maison de rendez-vous (1965), Projet pour une revolution a' New
York (1970), and Topologie d'une cite fant6me (1976). His films include:
L'Annie dernikre a Marienbad (1961), L'Immortelle (1963), Trans-Europ-
Express (1967), L'Homme qui ment (1968), L'Eden et aprbs (1970), Glissements
progressifs du plaisir (1974), and LeJeu avec lefeu (1975). He has presented
his views on contemporary fiction in Pour un Nouveau Roman. Bruce
Morrissette, author of books on Alain Robbe-Grillet and Sunny Distin-
guished Service Professor in the department of Romance languages and
literatures at the University of Chicago, has translated "Order and Dis-
order in Film and Fiction."

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1977 3

worse than order. Once order was reestablished, it was again contested
by everybody, and everybody said that they could not endure it.
What is interesting is that it is not any particular order which is not
endurable, it is order in general. People who live under communistic
regimes cannot endure the communist regime any more than we can
endure bourgeois order. This is simply because order itself is what is not
endurable. At the same time we have to deal with order, and as a writer I
have had direct experience of this, beginning with my first publications.
When I write, I write with great care, organizing structures that seem to
me beautiful, demonstrably provable, even almost pedagogic. There is in
my work a concern for formal order which is very evident to me. Take
the example of my novelLa Jalousie, at present the most celebrated of my
novels: I had worked for two years on an extraordinarily precise formal
organization which seemed to me as if it should gain wide support. I had
created and established such a fine narrative order that I thought I
would finally be recognized and that they would give me the Prix Gon-
court, the Prix Femina, the Nobel Prize, and all the rest. What happened
was exactly the opposite.I was quite surprised, pained almost, not to see
the importance of my work recognized. This novel was a total failure.
The majority of the reviewers, even critics who had rather liked Les
Gommes and Le Voyeur, reacted as if they found themselves, when faced
with this book, in front of absolute disorder. The critic at Le Monde said
that he had surely received a copy whose pages had been mixed up by
the printer, that it was a jumbled mess. What had seemed to me a struc-
ture so obvious that everyone must finally recognize how well founded it
was, appeared to these supposedly cultured readers as just anything-as
phrases and sentences put end to end which had absolutely no meaning,
as a story which did nothing more than turn round and round with
repetitions, with contradictions, and so forth-as all the things that
should not be done in a well-constructed narrative. Obviously I was
right, but they were also; that is, the word "order" probably did not have
the same meaning for them and for me. For them it was a question of
established order, and for me it was a question of creating an order. In
my opinion the role of the writer-or of any other artist-is to be a
creator of forms, an organizer of forms; on the contrary the academic
critic, who is in power in France and in many other countries, thinks that
to write in particular is to respect an order, to yield to established order.
Here then are two conceptions of order which are fundamentally op-
posed: one is established order, the other is created order, that is, the
movement of organization created by the very work of the writer.
It must be pointed out at once that these two types of order do not
present themselves in the same way. One advances masked; the other
calls attention to itself by its artifice. You know that established order
always claims to be natural. And it is rather striking that in every society,

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4 Alain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder

even the maddest, established order is presented to the public

leaders as something quite natural-that is, just and definitive
forth. You know, for example, that in Nazi Germany, which was a
mad society, there were theoreticians who presented as quite natu
"fact" that the so-called Aryan race should dominate the othe
This was "natural." This is what Marx called ideology. In sum, ide
is established order which is masked as natural order, which prete
be not a creation of the society but, on the contrary, a sort of div
dictated, so to speak, by God, just as He dictated the tables of his
Moses. Every society pretends that its laws are natural and tries t
them endure. Tries, I say, and succeeds rather well thanks to
producers of ideology-our schools, our universities, and the like.
The same thing happens in the order of the narrative. That or
not at all an exercise in style engaged in by a few privileged ind
cut off from the world but exactly the same thing as the social
political order, and moral order of the society in which the liter
develops. Contemporary essayists, among them Roland Barthe
shown to what extent the forms of Balzac's style-that is, the use
third person of the passe simple, the use of chronology, causality,
like-were linked to a whole ideology of bourgeois society at the b
ning of the nineteenth century. And it is probably true that
thought that this order was natural. When one reads Balzac's
spondence or examines the way in which he worked, one has the d
impression that he never questioned the assumptions of the narr
order which he employed. Nevertheless, these questions were
lated within Balzac's own lifetime by Flaubert. The questions of w
speaking, in whose name he speaks, why he narrates in that part
fashion, and the like, began to be considered and came more and
to invade the narrative. Consequently the problems of order a
order affected narrative.
Nonetheless, the Balzacian narrative remains in power. The little
French student who arrives at the age of reading is immediately con-
ditioned by a certain number of rules of the narrative which are pre-
sented to him as something natural. In reality, they will be inculcated in
him, because if those rules really were natural, he would know them at
birth. A little child is natural and if he has to be taught how one narrates,
it is because to narrate is not natural. French children, who go to school
for the first time and who know, in a manner of speaking, just how to
write, are given an exercise by the teacher who wishes to determine their
level of culture. The exercise is to be written in one hour of class time
and is to "relate the nicest day of your vacation." It is usually that, isn't it?
Then the little children produce very strange narratives because they are
not yet conditioned by the narrative ideology of the society in which they
live. They produce stories which are surely a lot closer to the style of the
Nouveau Roman than to traditional novels, and the teacher immediately

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1977 5

protests. That's what he's there for, of course. Even though he is a

"teacher," and especially if he is a teacher with leftist tendencies (often
even if he is a socialist or communist) he will teach the child bourgeois
ideology in all of its splendor. And the little boy or the little girl is told:
"You understand, that is not the way to tell a story. You have described
the same scene twice. No, there's no use doing that. Just tell it once. Also,
you began in the evening, and then you talked about noon; then you
were back in the evening, and then you were telling about the morning.
Oh, no. The day must be related in chronological order." And little by
little in that manner the child is taught Balzacian order, a whole narra-
tive system based on causality and chronology.
Causality and chronology are really the same thing in a traditional
narrative. The succession of facts, the narrative concatenation, as is said
today, is based entirely on a system of causalities: what follows
phenomenon A is a phenomenon B, the consequence of the first; thus,
the chain of events in the novel. The very order of traditional narration
will be causality and temporality as causality. Now if one takes a Nouveau
Roman, or New Novel-let us choose a text like La Jalousie-what hap-
pens is entirely different. Instead of having to deal with a series of scenes
which are connected by causal links, one has the impression that the
same scene is constantly repeating itself, but with variations; that is,
scene A is not followed by scene B but by scene A', a possible variation of
scene A. Nevertheless, these scenes follow each other in an order which
should be that of temporality and causality.
Using the terms ofJakobson, a modern critic has said that the con-
temporary novel, and I think he was talking about La Jalousie, arranges
metaphors in the order of metonymy-that is, arranges elements which
should be interchangeable one with the other in an order, a succession,
which should be causal. I understand that the critic would be suprised by
that order, but I do not understand why he should complain that it
cannot be natural; it is not natural, but it is not unnatural either; it is no
more or less natural than traditional order. But this new order has the
great advantage of calling attention to its own artificiality, of pointing t
its mask with its finger, instead of hiding behind the appearance o
something natural, in essence, an ideological trap. It is the artifice itse
which appears on the scene in the novel. And the great advantage, in my
opinion, even the great didactic advantage, of this operation is to place
the reader opposite, so to speak, his own liberty. He is not told that th
world has been constructed once and for all and that his only duty is t
reproduce this world one more time according to the already create
forms borrowed from tradition; he is not told, then, that man will neve
change because he is an eternal and natural animal.
The new narrative mode will place the reader before a kind of
emptiness or vacuum, facing the possibility of creating his own order, hi
own organization, and, consequently, facing the possibility of changing

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6 Alain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder

the world, only not once and for all. This is something which obv
rather difficult to explain to the reader who seeks what he rega
"the truth." The concept of truth in fact disappears in this new
tion, for that order, as I've said, is a created order. It is not a re
tion of an order which already exists but an order created by the
tive itself. And the order is even, to some extent, created for no
once the book is completed one must not think that that particul
will remain as some fine statue of truth which could thereafter be re-
cuperated by disciples who would undertake to create little Jalousies in al
the centuries which will follow. Absolutely not. On the contrary, once th
book is finished, the order which was created by the book, revealing it
own artificiality, has disintegrated at the same time, and once the book i
finished, the only thing new that remains is each reader's freedom to
create for himself a new order, a new order of narration and a new orde
for the world.
Recently efforts have been made to formalize these notions, and one
of the most important contributions has been made by information
theory. For the first practitioners of information theory, information
and meaning were two ideas more or less parallel. Wienart, for example,
uses these two terms almost interchangeably. But theoreticians who fol-
lowed him became aware of the need to define in a more precise fashion
what was "information" and what was "meaning" in a message.
Now the question here is the message, and later on I will explain
how what applies in a message does not necessarily apply to literature,
or at least only applies to literature as a sort of metaphor. "Information"
in a text can be defined as a degree or form proportional to the im-
probability of the message conveyed. For example, let us suppose that it
is the month of August and that someone comes into the room and says
to us, "It is not freezing outside." There would be very little information
in this text since the probability that it would be freezing in the month of
August is so small in Chicago that it is practically nonexistent; the mes-
sage would teach us nothing. We say of the information in a message that
it is stronger if the probability of the event in the message announced is a
weak probability. Therefore, if this same person (in Chicago, in the
month of August) says, "It's freezing outside; the lake is frozen," he
would bring us a very sizable piece of information, a piece of informa-
tion effectively enormous, because there would have to be some un-
imaginable cataclysm for Lake Michigan to freeze in the month of Au-
gust. However, a difficulty immediately appears because the comment is
so improbable that, as a matter of fact, you would scarcely understand it;
that is, you would have a message whose quantity of information would
be extremely strong but whose meaning would be extremely weak. On
the contrary, with the comment, "It is not freezing outside," the informa-
tion is zero, but at the same time, one cannot say that that is meaningless.
In fact, it has great meaning; the meaning even rises to a maximum. So,

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1977 7

you see that, contrary to the opinion of the information theorists of the
first generation, information and meaning are not parallel quantities but
quantities in opposition exactly on this fundamental point of probability.
For the meaning of a message is linked to its probability, whereas the
information is linked to its improbability.
It seems to me that when I work I come to grips with this problem. I
am less conscious of it when I'm alone writing a novel than when I make
a film. Technicians of the film are exactly like academic literary critics;
they are the watchdogs of ideology. That is why they are there-to
respect the rules so that established order may function normally in the
narrative. Now that I have made seven or eight films, the technicians
have come to understand that they should not try to understand, so to
speak. But when I made my first film, L'Immortelle, I would be asked
"Now, what do we do, boss?" Each time I explained, "Well, let's see-you
do that, you do this," the whole team of some fifty people would rise up
as one man and say to me, "It's not possible." It was not possible because
it did not correspond to the code. For example, suppose that I had
decided that we were going to shoot a scene which was the sequel to the
scene that we shot the afternoon or the evening before, and that I asked
the principal actor to wear a different costume. Immediately the script
girl, the young woman who watches over the continuity of the film,
would come up to me and say, "Ah, no, it's not possible, because in the
same scene one would see someone with two different costumes. We will
have to show the character changing costumes, because if you don't see
the change in costume, there will be an empty space as if suddenly
someone were ..." Well, obviously for a normal technician of the
movies, that could only mean a mistake, an error, arising from the fact
that someone had forgotten the costume that was worn the evening
before.

Now I became aware that what I wanted to do was exactly a series of

changes, those changes which were in information and just the opposite
of meaning. If someone at the beginning of a scene is wearing a her-
ringbone suit, and if you see him again at the end of the scene in the
same costume, no information is conveyed. If, on the contrary, I make
him wear another costume for the end of the scene, information will be
conveyed when the image appears, but the meaning becomes im-
mediately lessened. The amateurs of Cartesianism of the traditional kind
will protest, "We don't understand." And I say, "You don't understand
what? You see someone who has one costume and then you see him in
another costume. There is nothing to be understood. It is a piece of
information--that is, it is the same person wearing another costume."
Ah yes, but beginning at the moment when one does not understand,
having no meaning is equated to disorder. This is very important, for in
information theory, order is proportional to the quantity of information,
that is, to probability. One calls order the quantity of information which

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8 Alain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder

is necessary to describe a system entirely, and very often for the

thinker, this system will appear, to the contrary, as a source of di
Let me give an example.
You have before you an expanse of virgin beach that is very
swept; there is no mark upon it. If I wish to cause a bit of informa
appear in this field, I will cross the field, and the imprint of my f
leave extremely unlikely organizati6ns-statistically, I mean-of
of sand so that something is seen to have passed by. That is, som
new is learned: there are footsteps on the sand. And of course th
complex a system is, the more pieces of information are requ
describe it.
Now for the average mind it would seem that order is synonymous
with simplicity. Take, for instance, a paneled room: wood panelings
can be arranged in a very simple rectangular style lined along horizontal
series; I can describe that particular order in very few words. If, on the
contrary, I had to deal with these same rectangles arranged as if by
chance, I would have an order nonetheless, since it would have been
foreseen by the architect, but it would be a much more complex order
and would require many more words to describe it completely. There
will be as much more order as there will be complexity in the organiza-
tion of the elements. Therein, no doubt, lies the gap in communication
between the creators of modern narrative, the creators of modern art in
general, and the public well conditioned by ideology. When a system is
highly improbable and highly complex, it will no longer be perceived as a
system, and the information theorists say that what is involved at that
point is noise.
What is noise, then, in a message? It is something which does not
belong to what the message communicates but is produced in the trans-
mission, owing to, for example, the bad quality of the machine. When
the critic at Le Monde said of LaJalousie that he thought that his copy had
fallen apart somehow and that the pages had been rearranged, he was
giving a very exact definition of noise; all he could perceive in dealing
with an order which was not what he had expected was absolute chance.
On the contrary, whatever one may think of it from the standpoint of its
beauty, La Jalousie is an ordered system of extremely high character,
extreme complexity, and extreme interest in its opposition to society's
view of narrative probability.
These are the problems which are really at the heart of the great
question of the difficulty of modern art. But it appears to me that these
problems are treated within the works themselves; the characters in my
books who arrange objects should have been some indication to the
reader of the road he was to travel. I think that my novels always contain
those characters who organize order, and those characters who organize
disorder-disorder obviously being a different order from the order
which considers itself to be order-so that a series of counter orders or

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1977 9

an anti-ideology is presented. If you take one of my early works you will

find, I think, that there is always someone who tries to compose a narra-
tive, and this somebody is more or less similar to the guardian of
established order who would still wish to belong to the happy period of
Balzac.
How does La Jalousie begin, for example? "Now the shadow of the
column, the column which holds up the southwest angle of the roof,
divides into two equal parts the corresponding angle of the terrace." It
seems that that is not at all the way that fine literature should begin. But
that's a different question. There is in the phrase a voluntary concern on
the part of someone, a narrator, who wishes to organize the world at a
glance: the absent narrator of LaJalousie has a kind of fascination for all
established orders. The column, the shadow of the pillar, the angle
divided exactly into two call to mind a sun dial, the sun dial which counts
the hours, a guarantee of the good chronological organization of the
text. These elements are repeated in La Jalousie from one end to the
other. Throughout the book we encounter, on one hand, that concern of
someone who wants to maintain order and, on the other, the concern of
the text which goes against the narrator and which is an organizer of
disorder, that is, of another order which attempts to penetrate the text.
Perhaps another example will be helpful. You know that one of the
very important elements of the European novel of the great period was
the rhythm of the seasons. Winter, spring, summer, and autumn are,
quite exactly, a guarantee that time has not been turned around. But in
La Jalousie everything goes rather badly because-and not by chance at
all, of course-this book takes place more or less at the equator. Now, at
the equator each day is exactly six hours long; night falls each evening at
six o'clock. Therefore, nothing distinguishes a winter day from a sum-
mer day. Moreover, since there are no seasons as such, harvesting can be
done at any time; there will be areas that are being worked, areas being
planted, areas being harvested, other areas being plowed, all at the same
moment on the same plantation. The rhythm of the seasons, which plays
such a big role in narrative humanism, suddenly disappears; it is as if it
were to no avail that the shadow of the pillar marks the time since in fact
this time no longer has any significance. It is no longer indicative of
anything: the days simply repeat each other with variations, constituting
metaphors arranged in the order of metonymy.
One of my students, a young Cuban girl, once pointed out to me
that the maintenance of order in my works was always confided to a male
adult of the white race, and probably not by chance. I had not realized it
myself. I created these narrators I will not say naturally but nevertheless
with a certain innocence: the one in LaJalousie who tries to regulate life
on the plantation, the one who voluntarily uses the third person singular
to attempt to create a coherent narrative according to the traditional
scheme, the one in La Maison de rendez-vous who periodically takes over

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10 Alain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder

the constantly interrupted narration. In the latter there is a phr

is reiterated in the book: "I arrived at the Blue Villa at ten minutes after
nine in a taxi." This is much the same as "We were at our desks when the
principal came in accompanied by a new pupil," the opening sentence of
Madame Bovary. Only, in La Maison de rendez-vous, things immediately go
wrong. "I arrived at the Blue Villa at ten minutes after nine in a taxi. A
park filled with dense vegetation surrounds the house on each side."
And immediately that is the beginning of disorder because the narrator
never really traverses the park; he gets lost on the way in his own narra-
tion and never arrives, never manages to explain in truth what hap-
pened that evening when the English police burst into the salon of Lady
Ava in Hong Kong.
The organizers of disorder are, on the contrary, nearly always, and
even always, the student claimed, women, children, or colored people.
The world represented by the wife of the narrator in La Jalousie thus
contains someone who should belong to the world of order but who is
suspected of associations with the world of disorder-that is, with black
men who speak an incomprehensible language which she is suspected of
understanding. There is in the novel, very obviously, a sort of con-
nivance between this woman and the hostile population, not because she
is evil or mean but because she is incomprehensible; therefore she repre-
sents disorder. In all of my books, and I am convinced of this after
reflection, it is true that against the adult white male there is always that
which is not male, that which is not adult, and that which is not of the
white race.
Just as the readers of my novels, too well conditioned by established
order, find that all that escapes from that order appears to be disorder,
pure noise, so it is with the spectators of my films. The entire narration
of Glissements progressifs du plaisir is constructed on slippages of meaning
among a whole panoply of objects which were chosen at the outset to
organize the narrative. That seems so bizzare-it is so different from
what the normal spectator expects-that in fact the reaction to this type
of film is either to see nothing at all or to see exactly the opposite of what
my intention was-that is, ideology itself. I will explain why.
The material which I use in organizing narratives, novels, and films
is ideological; that is, it is cut from the discourses that society addresses to
me. In LaJalousie, for example, it is obvious that the organization of the
scenes is not normal by the standards of traditional narrative. At the
same time the elements are very recognizable: the colonial narrative-a
man and a woman and a neighbor on a lost plantation in the middle of
black men in Africa or wherever; the couple, or rather the trio--the
jealous husband, who suspects his wife of sleeping with the neighboring
planter. Obviously for me these elements are not interesting as themes;
they are only fragments of society's ideology which I turn away from
their normal usage. In order to function correctly in society, ideology

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1977 11

needs to be masked to hide its artificiality, and needs as well to be con-

tinuous, since ideology can only function as a totality.
This is something very apparent in contemporary society, where we
see leaders becoming distrustful of the slightest change which may oc-
cur. For example, at present in Prague, jazz musicians are persecuted.
One could say, "Well, what of that? There are now other problems in
Czechoslovakia, are there not-problems of agriculture going very
badly, there's the national debt which is enormous," and so forth and so
on. Nevertheless the people who come together in their own homes to
play jazz or, even worse, American pop music are sent to prison. One
might say, "there is a society which is really going to pot." But no, not at
all. Because ideology needs to be a totality, if a single point is contested,
everything immediately collapses. That is why in this continual discourse
I cut out fragments, and it is these fragments which serve to create my
speech, to develop my own discours. My discourse is not that of society, it
is even opposed to society's discourse, but it uses the same elements to
such an extent that the danger often arises of another misunderstanding.
The danger is that of reestablishing ideological continuity so that
nothing is seen in the film but what the narrative would be if it were
organized according to the rules. Such a danger exists for a narrative like
L'Eden et apres because it makes use of stereotypes of eroticism and exoti-
cism somewhat along the lines of the Club Mediterran&e in France. An
inattentive spectator conditioned by ideology would completely miss
these structures of the film and would reestablish the discourse of the
society in which he lives, but this discourse is not mine, and is even th
opposite of mine.
In any event, I realize fully that the parole, the speech, the "word" o
a writer such as myself, has something strange and even contradictory
about it, even within its own creator. At the moment when I write, let u
say, La Jalousie or Glissements progressifs du plaisir, what I propose is im
probable and consequently unacceptable; that is, my parole as a writer or
as a cineaste in my novels or in my films is abrupt, inexplicable, non-
recuperable for any correctly organized discourse. Nevertheless, yo
have noticed that I speak with the same clarity as any professor, and th
constitutes an extremely interesting contradiction because it goes to th
very heart of the debate; order and disorder never cease to interact, to
contaminate each other, to practice a sort of mutual recuperation. I
having written a novel of disorder, I don't find someone-for example,
Bruce Morrissette, about La Jalousie-to prove that it has order, I'll do i
myself. The principle of order is so crucial that I wish to prove that the
disorder which I've created I can myself transform into order. But, as
soon as I have shown that it has its order, from that moment on I've
destroyed the interest of my work. I have brought about within an orga-
nized discourse, organized according to the normal logic of Car-
tesianism, the recuperation of something which was in fact a machine of

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12 A lain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder

war against order. I often run into people who say to me after a f
"Ah, it's a pity that you didn't come to explain all of that before th
We didn't understand a thing, and it is such a fine thing that you
explained it." And I reply, "Yes, but don't trust that too much," b
what I've said is not at all the film. It is even almost the opposite; it
way in which I show myself that there is in what I create a part wh
in spite of everything, explainable by established order, and a par
creasingly large, because order progresses.
It is rather interesting how the movement of order progresses.
berto Eco has given a lengthy analysis of this problem in a fin
called L'Oeuvre ouverte (The Open Work), in which he uses the exam
the tonal system in music. Whereas the modal system to an astoni
degree remained the same in any given civilization from centu
century, the tonal system, a very interesting order, was susceptib
disorder precisely because it was hierarchical. Bach formalized
music according to a scale of twelve tones organized in a hierarchy,
each scale-such as C major, A flat minor-containing eight no
degrees, also in a hierarchical relationship. When Beethoven ad
this system, he introduced dissonances, intervals which should no
in the scale in question, harmonies which belong to other tonalitie
which put into danger the hierarchy of the notes. One could no lo
confidently say, at certain moments, that this note was the dominan
note the leading tone, this note the tonic, this other one the
dominant. One now had to deal with harmonies which could be dis-
sonances.

Eco says that deviations with respect to a code

to pleasure. That is, what I have said to you is no
but has a direct relation to the pleasure derived
or reading a text or looking at a picture. Th
inherit from society will become the system of
me to create separations-deviations-and it is
deviation appears that something will happen in
When dissonance appears in Beethoven's work a
as if a foot is held up in the air. There is a sort o
a sort of waiting, and then there appears a new
which, through an unexpected solution-for Eco
unexpected-permits us to fall back into the basic
little the system is degraded; that is, Beetho
dissonances resolved-also creates a new order, since once his works
have been accepted, that whole system is also integrated into the tonal
system. The musician who comes afterwards will find himself facing a
coded horizon which will have progressed, which will have changed its
level. And the history of art itself is one of disorders which appear
against a horizon of order; disorders become generalized and bring
about a new order against which will appear new disorders.

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1977 13

It is Wagner who appears against the Beethovian horizon and be-

gins to refuse to resolve cadences, so that his works become, more and
more, immense, continuous dissonances. When you listen to Tristan and
Isolde, it is as if you were in the presence of a dissonance which begins
with the first harmony and continues throughout the work; you are
never allowed to fall back onto your feet, saying to yourself, "Ah, yes,
now I am in B major. Of that I am sure." You are always in what Wagner
called "vague harmonies." But these vague harmonies became gener-
alized too; and the next step was the death of the tonal system in the
form of Schoenberg's duodecaphonic music. Schoenberg reasoned that
in order for the hierarchy between all the notes to be truly abolished,
each note had to be repeated as often as all the others. He created what
are called "serial arrangements": the work is cut up into a certain
number of fragments in which the twelve notes of the scale are repeated
in different orders but in which no note is ever repeated until the rest of
the twelve have been completely utilized.
This history of the tonal system is interesting since it indicates what
could indeed be the death of a certain kind of literature. When Flaubert
arrived on the Balzacian horizon, it was easy to create disorder. The
smallest deviation seemed monstrous. Charles Bovary's hat in the first
pages of Madame Bovary was an enormous scandal, all the more since in
the original version the fragment, I believe, was much longer than in th
final text. Flaubert's good friends, Bouillet and Maxime Du Camp, ex
plained to him that this description of the hat was much too long. They
said to Flaubert, "Listen, that's not the way a story is told. This hat has no
relation to the narrative; therefore, it is much too long. You may wish to
show some picturesque detail, but for the economy of your narration,
you've got to shorten it." So, a great scandal because of a tiny deviation
These deviations become generalized, and a hundred years later the dif-
ficulty in creating a remarkable deviation with respect to a system which
is already enormously degraded becomes itself enormous.
I said a while back that it was easy to produce an event by simply
crossing over a sandy beach and leaving one's footprints. But if one
hundred persons cross the beach, you have what the information
theorists call a system of equiprobability: instead of the inert system
which consisted of grains of sand perfectly flat, you will have another
inert system which consists of grains of sand in little piles. You have all
seen a beach like that on Long Island some Sunday afternoon when
everybody has passed by; when someone else crosses over the sand n
more information appears. At that moment it would be necessary to
imagine something quite different in order to produce a piece of in-
formation on the sandy surface, for example, a bicycle-the bicycle ofLe
Voyeur. Against this new inert horizon it is sufficient for me to imagine
some different type of information-not a new piece of information in
the same system, but another type of information.

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14 Alain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder

You have all come across the word entropy in your recent readi
it is word which is very much a la mode. Entropy, a term borrowed f
thermodynamics, is the measurement of the tendency of a given sys
to move toward its own death. I showed how the tonal system had
duced its own death by its very functioning. And I think that the n
tive system which attained its apogee in the first half of the ninete
century in France is a system which indeed remained as the organiz
pole of all subsequent novelistic discourse. But it has becom
creasingly degraded. When I came onto the scene, for example,
could still shock an academic critic. Now, only twenty years later,
difficulty faced by young writers who would like to scandalize lite
criticism is enormous. They are now obliged to show themselves in t
nudity, or to do other such things which have very little relationshi
literature, because the narrative system has reached the point
equiprobability-it is inert-as the information theorists say. Not
can any longer be produced in it, except that some other type o
formation can intervene into the system. This is why I do not a
believe in the death of literature: man is that animal who at each moment
invents other creative possibilities, other possible pieces of information,
in a world which appears to become inert at every moment.
There is another domain of the novel which does not manipulate
narrative forms but which manipulates words themselves. One such
book has appeared, and one has the impression that no one could go any
further. And yet one can continue to write, but write by producing other
types of deviation against the same coded horizon formed by society.
These problems are at present the subject of dialogues in France
between the people, for example, in the Tel Quel group and people of
the Nouveau Roman group (or what was called the Nouveau Roman
previously); they are concerned, that is, with the question, What is the
limit of the elements of order whose integrity should be respected? For
example, in film, What is the length of a scene which will permit a
spectator to feel that he is in the world and, at the same time, to hold
opposite this world a critical position attuned to the ruptures which will
be introduced in the text in the discourse with society?
We can approach this question, too, by way of communication
theory. All those who are occupied with communication theory point out
that there is in a message a number of letters or even of words which are
useless. If I say in French, "Les petits garcons pleurent," the "les" in-
dicates the plural. Therefore, the "s" which comes at the end of "petits,"
the "s" at the end of "garCons," and the "nt" on "pleurent" are com-
pletely redundant: they transmit no new information. The coefficients
of redundancy of any given language have been calculated, and each
language has a redundancy which is peculiar to it. I think the coefficient
in the English language is 50 percent-that is 50 percent of the letters

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1977 15

are useless-whereas in French it is, I believe, much greater. But I can-

not guarantee the accuracy of these figures.
This is a little bit like what happens in the narrative, for indeed the
narrative code of which I spoke-the code which sets itself up little by
little against the code which is in power-will need, in order to create
itself, a certain number of redundant elements. The same effect will
have to be created several times over in order for the reader, or the
listener, or the spectator to be able to perceive this deviation as part of a
code.

I will give you an example. Bob Wilson is an American playwright

who has created a number of quite interesting plays which are regularly
performed in Iran and in France but, I think, rather seldom in America.
Le Regard du sourd (The Glance of the Deaf Man), La Lettre a la Reine
Victoria (The Letter to Queen Victoria), and the latest, Einstein on the Beach,
are extremely curious because they develop no apparent meaning but
bring into play codes which are modified at each moment. For example,
one character says, "AB," and each time a different character answers,
"BA." After one hears "AB, BA, AB, BA, AB, BA" for a while, the
system is so established that it becomes a code. But at that moment when
the first character says again, "AB," and the other answers, "BB," you
have something happening; you have another deviation which will also
become generalized. Take another example (one which also can be
found in my own films), that of linking a noise and a gesture. Each time
that a character does a particular thing, you hear, for instance, a bell.
The sound of the bell has no relationship to the gesture, of course, but a
code is established, and I assure you that when the character does the
same thing again and no bell rings, there will again be a piece of in-
formation and there will be a deviation. Redundancy is therefore neces-
sary for the message.
The information theorists have discovered that it is necessary that
the redundant elements be sufficiently important, sufficiently numer-
ous, so that we not attribute to noise what was truly an element of
communication, a piece of information. But the length of narrative ele-
ments is extremely variable, and the possibilities change with the length
of these elements. How many times must I say, "AB, BA, AB, BA," in
order to set up a code?
Wilson's latest play, Einstein on the Beach, begins by using as its words
practically nothing more, I think, than 1, 2, 3, 4, or the first eight letters.
For more than two hours (the play lasts five, I believe), the text is com-
posed only of those words and of their combinations. Indeed at times
one says to oneself, "Well, it's too long, isn't it." That is, one could have
made much less suffice. So you see, the problem of redundancy is ex-
tremely important to the extent that it implicates or involves the spec-
tator.

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16 Alain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder

It is possible that L'Eden et apres owed its success to the somew

excessive length of certain elements in the diegesis, or narrative con
which allowed the spectator to eliminate what puzzled him or upset
in order to retain only what could have had or appeared to ha
normal functioning. I think that the length of the fragments is extre
important, for at the opposite end you have the experiments of ce
groups-the Tel Quel group, for example-in which the ideolo
fragments are so small that in the time that they last one does not
ognize them. One then falls into the other danger of completely esca
from the world as if one were outside of society, outside of ideology,
the revolution were already accomplished. But, what revolution?
have no idea since we have no model of a revolution which satisfies us.

Q: You speak of installing disorder, but a disorder which by recupera-

tion becomes a new order. To a certain extent you never leave the
binary system.
A: Why do you say that it is a binary system?
Q: Because you bring about order/disorder.
A: Not at all, dear sir. In my explanatory discourse here, yes. And this
happens precisely because I have taken that precaution. The opposi-
tion between order and disorder is a scholarly exercise and, vis vis
this discourse, you are right to say that. But I've pointed out at the
beginning that in the text itself the relationships are much more
ambiguous and shifting.
Q: I agree, but at that moment you produce a synthesis, and it is a
synthesis which nevertheless comes from this binarity.
A: A synthesis? No. Personally I don't think so. I would not employ the
expressions binary opposition and synthesis. It is my impression that
it is rather a question of a series of slippages, of a series of de-
centralizations, of displacements. What interests me is to displace
things in relation to their normal position. I understand very well
what you say, and you are right to point out this danger, in fact. It is
even possible that a certain number of my works may fall into this
danger. But I don't think so, in spite of everything. The path that I
point out here escapes from this danger precisely because it is never
a question of replacing the Tsar's statue by a statue of Stalin. It is a
question of never placing any statue in position, but continuing to
slip.
Q: All right. In that case you clearly leave binarity and create a new
order. In fact, we might say, a third dimension.
A: A shifting order, but in any case I think I avoid the Hegelian system
of dialectic--of thesis, antithesis, synthesis-which Hegel calls Auf-

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1977 17

hebung, a word completely untranslatable into French but which

means the domination of contradiction by something else.
Q: But the fact is that there is an order, and that is the great danger.
A: No, because-this carries me even further-I indicated that when I
did not have an intelligent critic to create an order, I was ready to do
it myself. That is, I do not want to install myself in a comfortable
position, wherein I could more or less fall asleep in my own re-
dundancy; on the contrary, it is my impression that this action of
recuperation is extremely interesting. Let me take the example of La
Jalousie. When La Jalousie appeared in France, there was general
stupefaction. Nobody could understand any of it. Well, Bruce Mor-
rissette [in The Novels of Robbe-Grillet], an American critic more or less
unknown in France at the time except for his works on the Rimbaud
forgery, said all of a sudden, "But I don't know what you're talking
about. It is perfectly readable." And he set about decomposing the
novel, showing that a psychological meaning can function perfectly
within this text. The book became readable; it was subject to re-
cuperation, as you say, and at the same time it was to a certain extent
destroyed. At that moment, either the book is entirely absorbed by
the system and consequently is not a very interesting work and will
disappear, or else another critic will be able, beginning with the same
book, to develop a formal system and a system of meaning com-
pletely different. For example, Lenardt's on La Jalousie entitled Lec-
ture politique du roman (or Political Interpretation of the Novel), points
out a whole group of things as far from my own ideas as posssible
but which are nonetheless in the book. And 'I have the impression that
my disagreements at present with young critics like Jean Ricardou,
for example, are attributable to this discrepancy.
Q: You made a comparison a little while ago between music and lan-
guage. Don't you think that this comparison is limited to the poetic
function of language and language as communication? That is, that
the connotative function or referential function of language would
escape from any comparison with music? In music it is not a question
of the order of words, but the order of things.
A: Yes, in principle you are quite right. And I pointed out myself that
this was a metaphor. But you have developed another metaphor
when you speak of the referential function. To be sure that particu-
lar function plays an extremely important role in communication,
for example, when I go to the baker's to buy a loaf of bread. But if,
on the contrary, I'm seated at my desk and I am writing, the ref-
erential function disappears to a large extent. For when I write on
my paper, "It is raining," I am not at all bound by this rain. I can
write immediately afterwards, "The sun is shining." Now, from the
point of view of referential functioning, I obtain something which
would be impossible in communication but which -will be quite possi-

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18 A lain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder

ble in literature, where indeed we have seen it. We know today,

the work of Ricardou in particular, that narrative has nothing t
with the referential.
In my first novels I still believed that reference existed. But at
present I can very well locate a novel in Hong Kong or in New York
and still put in that novel elements which are completely nonexistent
in the city in question. This has been pointed out by many people,
especially for New York. The referential function has not, I would
say, completely disappeared, but it has become considerably di-
minished, even with respect to communication or the language of
communication. The aspects studied by Jakobson are categories use-
ful to linguistics but not often operational in literature. When I make
use of information theory, obviously it is only as a sort of metaphor.
Every piece of information presupposes a message, a communica-
tion to be established. There is something to be said. Whereas when I
write, I also have something to say, but it is not a something of the
same nature.

I do not want there to be a truth concerning the t

fact the text is not an object of truth; nevertheless, I
interesting when it is pointed out to me that there is,
some meaning. That is, if I say that my enemy is meani
created meaning; in spite of everything, I come to grip
ing. But when, after I have written a novel, it is poin
that a system of meaning can be applied to it in entiret
does worry me. So it is interesting that I will find my
of this comfortable position for a new slippage. After
wrote Dans le labyrinthe, which then to a great exten
rejected those psychological explanations. But Dans le l
subjected to an even worse recuperation with metaphy
tions and such-the lost soldier, his soul in the box that he was
carrying, and so forth. So what did I do then? Then I wrote La
Maison de rendez-vous, where, systematically, instead of cutting up
elements of a humanistic discourse, I cut into the discourse of society
itself; I used the advertising pamphlets of steamship lines, ads for
the orient, and the like. So at that moment, I made a new escape.
It is my impression that if there had been no recuperation, there
would be no need to go ahead. What urged a painter like Picasso, for
instance, constantly to do different things which always seemed
bizarre and deceptive? It is precisely because the society in which we
live is always in the act of devouring itself, is it not? Trotsky's books
are sold as paperbacks and become a piece of merchandise. This is
also a type of recuperation. My presence here, whatever my speech
may be, is already a kind of recuperation.
Q: Can you imagine a text which could escape from this system of
recuperation?

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1977 19

A: In my own opinion it would not be an interesting text, because it

would be an angelical text, that is, a text which is in and for itself.
One cannot be outside of ideology.
Q: Would that be worthwhile?
A: To be outside of ideology? Well, first the revolution would have to be
accomplished. But what revolution? At the present time ...
Q: But one should contribute to it.
A: Of course. But as for that, it will only be known later whether or not I
have done so. But in any case, it will not occur by pretending to go
outside of ideology myself. That is not how I could undermine it.
The only proper name I think which appears in my novel Dans le
labyrinthe is that of Henri Martin. We learn that the soldier, the dead
soldier, was named Henri Martin. Now Henri Martin is a French
sailor of the war-time navy who during the war of Indo-China (that
is our Vietnam War) put emery powder in the works of a French war-
ship, and that strikes me as a very interesting maneuver. He
was on the boat. He had accepted being on the boat, but he made
the gear wheels grind. And the ship ended up by coming to a
complete halt because of this grinding. There was a very famous trial,
and all France was shaken up by the story of Henri Martin.
It is often suggested to me that I should become a member of
the Academie Frangaise, and I say, "What interest would I have in
that?" It is simply a way of inflating one's ego. But sometimes I ask
myself, "May I be wrong in this?" Let us suppose that I do accept. I
could for example, publish a perfectly scandalous text--even a por-
nographic one--quite openly and sign it "Alain Robbe-Grillet of the
French Academy." And that might be interesting. So, you see, there
is this difficulty. If I accept joining the Academie Frangaise, im-
mediately it will be said, "Ah, now he has joined the Academy." But
that might be one way of bringing the Academy to a grinding halt.
One can only work against ideology on the one hand by point-
ing it out, and on the other hand in making it grind so that it can be
heard, so that it will not be innocent, so that it will lose in fact that
beautiful mask of innocence and of being natural. First one creates
something which points it out, erotic elements for example. You
know to what extent violence, erotic violence in particular, is impor-
tant in our whole contemporary mythology. Well then, in my films
you will find that. But at each moment it makes a grinding sound.
There is something which doesn't fit. When the amateurs of pornog-
raphy come into the movie halls where my films are being shown,
they are furious. They even tried to break the chairs once in a
working-class movie house. And this is interesting, because theoreti-
cally they are being shown the images that they like, and yet in reality
they don't like them at all for the very reason that there is that
constant grinding sound. Yes, then I think, as Roland Barthes has

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20 A lain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder

said-I forget in what connection, but he said it recently-tha

can only work against ideology from or within the interior of
self. Indeed ideology is within me. I too have learned to write
Balzac. I too have learned all that.
Q: Yes, but the great danger is that if one places one's self within ide
ogy, it is ideology that will twist you about.
A: Not at all. If you place yourself outside of it, you will place yourself
a world aside. But it-ideology-will continue to function very w
indeed. You will cause it no harm. It will have invented by itself a
category which it will call upon. I don't know whether any of you
have recently been to Copenhagen, but there is a kind of enormou
space in the middle of Copenhagen which has been abandoned
marginal characters-down-and-outers-where one can take drug
or do whatever one wishes. While this goes on, the Danish
bourgeoisie continues to function all around. And the Danish
bourgeoisie on Sunday circulates around through this terrain just
go and look at the marginal people of ideology. Well, that is th
great danger. It is a much greater danger, in fact the greate
danger.

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