lOOKS
309
ed
and agitated eastern bank of the Mississippi in the prologue to
.dtala.
I admire and dislike both pieces, but I'm willing to think of them
as
historically useful. It is perfectly true that Robbe-Grillet's novels
lack
spontaneity and that special kind of human density we have been
trained to respond to in fiotion; but it is as
if
he were refusing one
10ft of richness in an
admirabl~and,
quite naturally, artificial-effort
to
give another fresh start
to
our ceaseless activity of inventing reality.
-The experimental character of Robbe-Grillet's novels is nonetheless
undermined by a tricky way of exploiting traditional psychological
content.
The Erasers
suggests a psychological parallel to Robbe-Grillet's
esthetic hesitation between what might be called the ideally floating
story
and
a
novel of perfectly controlled and definable psychological
meaning. Both Wallas and Garinati have urgent tasks to perform, but
they, like Robbe-Grillet at what I take to be his best, are highly imagina–
tive
lingerers. WalIas dreams of "an inevitable and perfect future," one
toward
which he could move in a straight line, with mechanical, precise,
always
necessary gestures. Only Dupont is imagined as a successful non–
lingerer in the novel, and, more interesting than the trite Oedipal
envy
suggested by the contrast of Wallas' pitiful search for an ideal eraser with
the compact, hard, heavy cube on Dupont's desk, the victim is
re–
membered by his wife as having that "lack of fantasy" which WalIas
would need to stop being sidetracked from his investigation. Like his
characters, Robbe-Grillet seems unable to choose between the free and,
in
a sense, non-purposeful proliferation of fantasy and a single story sup–
ported
by elaborate but wholly decipherable and definable psychological
symbolism. Nothing could be further from the open-ended work I've
described than the classical esthetic, with its emphasis on
unity,
harmony
of
parts,
and the orderly unfolding of an inevitable crisis. And yet the
impulse counteracting Robbe-Grillet's experimentalism does seem to
be
a nostalgia for form of the most rigorously disciplining kind. The
connecting link between the two is, as he has demonstrated, pathology:
the fantasies of the obsessively jealous man or the sadistic murderer,
while they may appear chaotic, contradictory, ready
to
go off in any
direction, are all tyrannically controlled and directed by a relentlessly
single-minded psychological purpose. Without psychology, Wallas' search
for an eraser or his fantasy of the provocative Mme. Dupont greeting
her
husband in the evening are, so to speak, purely novelistic temptations,
a way of using time in a gratuitously inventive way. But when we have
read
Bruce Morrissette's depressingly convincing enumeration of the
Oedipal symbols and references in the novel, the only inventiveness left
is
of the objectionable sort that consists
in
the writer's cleverly ca-
