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wife. It is as if, perhaps like his creator, he were more interested in a
multiplicity of views and conjectures than in a single story or solution.
This interest is much clearer in ]
ealoury
and
Last Year at M arienbad,
where "real" events are no longer provided against which the fantasies
may
be
checked; reality is
'Only
invented reality, and it is impossible and
irrelevant to ask which of the different scenes being tried out cor–
respond to what might actually be happening. This interest in pure
inventiveness explains, I
think,
what Barthes has called the "equal
pressure" at all points of a Robbe-Grillet narrative: no one story is
meant to
be
more significant-which, in all our fictions, always means
closer to reality-than any of the others.
The much discussed "objective" descriptions of Robbe-Grillet must
be
seen in the same light. A geometrical, non-metaphorical description
of an object does not exactly reduce that object to its mere
ctre-la,
or,
. in· fashionable French critical vocabulary, "reify" the human world.
Though the object may allude to nothing beyond its own physical
presence and sp.ock us by its apparent irrelevance to what surrounds
it in the novel, it also acquires a rare open-endedness and thus be–
comes
peculiarly
,available
to meaning. The meaningless object is ready
to be flooded with meaning, and in Robbe-Grillet the profusion of
fantasy and the deliberately unimaginative description are perhaps
really
two ways of expressing a single interest. There is both an as–
cetic refusal to novelize about the world (ascetic because this refusal
means, of course, the denial of a spontaneous impulse) and a temptation
to go on novelizing endlessly. Both procedures constitute an attack on the
novelist's usual willingness to mythologize reality by organizing it into spe–
cific meanings, and
to
exclude
many other meanings in order to protect
his
created significance from the assaults of uncontrollable conjecture.
U
Robbe-Grillet's work can be looked at, as Barthes has claimed, as
"an absolute exercise of negation," what is really being denied, it
seems to me, is a particular vocabulary of meaningfulness as well as
the public's expectations (formed and limited by past conventions) of
exactly how fictions can make life intelligible. There is, of course, an
air of transition in such an experiment, as well-and this is probably
inevitable-as something terribly deliberate and "literary." Robbe-Gril–
let's style has that calculated and irritating brilliance we often find in
writers intent on demonstrating, by their own audacities, how limited
and arbitrary the imaginative assumptions of past generations have
been. A strictly technical feat, like the description in
The Erasers
of the
railroad-station hall where Wallas meets Dr. Juard, reminded me, of
all
things, of Chateaubriand's self-advertising description of the crowd-
