lOOKS
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found in a depicted relationship between objects and/or events.
"Pro–
fundity,"
he writes in a sentence as shallow as it is sparkling, "has func–
tioned like a trap in which the writer captures the universe to hand
it over to society." What Robbe-Grillet wants is the chair and not the
"signification" of the chair, for "the world
is
neither significant nor
absurd. It
is,
quite simply." Quite simply!
Roland Barthes
(Evergreen
#5) gives a more sustained explanation:
Description for Robbe-Grillet is always 'anthological'-a matter of pre–
senting the object as if in a mirror, as if it were in itself a
spectacle,
permitting it to make demands on our attention without regard for its
relation to the dialectic of the story ... The object has no being beyond
phenomenon:
it is not ambiguous or allegorical . . . A slice of tomato
in an automat sandwich, described according to this method, constitutes
an object without heredity, without associations, and without references
... and refusing with all the stubbornness of its
thereness
to involve the
reader in an
elsewhere.
...
As one might expect, these writers look for support in certain kinds
of contemporary painting which seem also to represent the object in
its
thereness,
without volunteering any value other than that which
may reside in the visual moment.
But one is entitled to wonder: what principle of selection guides
Robbe-Grillet in choosing one object for description rather than another?
(An
"anthological" description obviously implies selection.) Why a to–
mato rather than a cucumber? From certain points of view, this is by
no means a trivial choice. And is not the act of choice necessarily de–
pendent upon some bias of meaning, with its "heredity" and "associa–
tions," regardless of whether the writer is aware of this fact? M. Bar–
thes's apparently casual reference to the position of the slice of tomato
-that it lies within an
automat
sandwich-supplies it with a complex
series of "depth" associations, indeed, with an entire historical aura.
For a painting it may be enough that the principle of selection be
the visual satisfaction that can be had simply from looking at a re–
produced version of an object, though here too one might wonder
whether the object can exist on the plane of
thereness
without leading
the observer to some
elsewhere.
But things would seem to be quite dif–
ferent in literature, among other reasons because the verbal description
of the object, no matter how effective, can seldom be as complete and
self-contained an aesthetic unit as can its representation in paint.
As
it happens, the reality of Robbe-Grillet's writing
is
quite differ–
ent from the claims of his theory. The compulsive anthologizing of
events and objects directs our attention not to the surface of things,
