BOOKS
305
MURDER fRENCH STYLE
THE ERASERS. By Alain Robbe-Grillat. Tran51ated by Richard Howard.
Grove Pre5S.
$4.95.
Roland Barthes, in a celebrated review of
The Voyeur,
wrote
that Robbe-Grillet's work is valuable only as "an absolute exercise of
negation," as an attempt
to
offer us "a novel without content." Such
statements tend, in France, to encourage the taste for polemics and ling–
uistic ingenuity that keeps
la vie litteraire
going; no one has bothered
to
speculate in any detail about the kind of novel that might justify these
remarks~
and Barthes himself speaks mainly of an attempt to describe
objects in a rigorously non-allusive way, to give us the surfaces of things
fm~lIy
freed from the meanings we invariably pour into them. It has, of
course, been easy
to
show that Robbe-Grillet's objects--for all the care–
fully
neutral language used
to
describe them-themselves describe very
particular, in fact pathological, human intentions. Indeed in a polite
preface to
B~ce
Morrissette's recent study of Robbe-Grillet, Barthes
himself announces, with some reluctance, the "return" of meaning to
the novelist's work. The meanings have apparently been created by the
public's demand for meaning, since "we are all part of Robbe-GriIIet,"
and
the evolution of his work cannot be separated from what so many
people have, persisted in demanding from it. The implications of such
clever thinking are clear: symbolism and psychology were not, it seems,
in
Robbe-Grillet when Barthes wrote "Litterature objective" and "Lit–
terature litterale," but the work has somehow capitulated to the pressures
of a meaning-hungry society. Alas, the meanings were there from the
beginning. But after seeing how they are spelled out by Morrissette and
others, we may want to define more precisely that other aspect of Robbe–
Grillet's achievement-or ambition-which Barthes had in mind in
1955, when he dismissed the sensationalist story of
The Voyeur
as
"tending toward zero" and proposed his curious notion of "a novel with–
out content."
Perhaps more
than
any other kind of fiction, the detective story
has
encouraged and satisfied the need for a world where meanings exist
and
where they can be discovered and possessed. Behind the conven–
tional confusion of events in the detective story is the promise of an ex–
planation of events-one in which causal connections and psychological
motives will transform random incidents into purposeful order-and
the pleasure of finding the world intelligible is, undoubtedly, all the
greater for its having been denied us during the course of the novel.
