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PETER BROOKS
(1961 ), cntics started accusing Robbe-Grillet of the heresies of subjec–
tivity, psychology and symbolism. They pointed out that his protagonists
were victims of psychological obsessions (sadism, jealousy), and that the
supposedly neutral glance upon the surface of things was in fact at the
service of an emotional state. His novels were reread, reinterpreted, and a
new Robbe-Grillet was posited. But this much-debated problem of sub–
jectivity/ objectivity, symbolic/ nonreferentia l, etc., seems to me a false
one, and Robbe-Grillet's assent to seemingly exclusive interpretations of
his method probably indicates that he thinks so too.
The problem with the debate is that it leaves the plane of rhetoric
where it should be located.
It
is undeniable that Robbe-Grillet's register–
ing glance is the instrument of someone, and that this someone is defined
by his subjectivity. An epistemological choice has been made, and the
world of objects cannot be "neutral." But the consciousness which directs
the glance provides only the focus of the eyepiece through which we see
the world; the world becomes the scene of the drama, and it does not
refer us back to consciousness. As Jean Ricardou has formulated it,
"Things, marked by the refusal of consciousness, become charged with
that which consciousness refuses": that is, the objective world becomes
the place of a subjective, emotional narrative in a new kind of
style
indirect.
Robbe-Grillet's use of time, his creation of an eternal present
of the indicative which gives equal status to what is "happening" and
what is only imagined or desired, is designed, as Gerard Genette has
demonstrated, to counter our natural reaction to rewrite certain pages in
the conditional, others in the subjunctive, and so on. Robbe-GriIIet's
rhetoric both prevents us from allegorizing and reading content into
reality, and charges reality with a creative emotional potentiality. He
succeeds in giving us a sense of
presence
(a word he uses to describe the
effect of Beckett's plays) which is nonsymbolic and nonutilitarian, but
not at all nonaffective.
If
Robbe-Grillet has sought to destroy the "romantic heart of
things," there is a sense in which he is constantly fascinated by the
romanticism of surfaces, a preoccupation especially noticeable in the films
Marienbad
and
L'Immortelle,
and quite explicit in his new novel,
La
Maison de Rendez-vous.
The romantic surface is here one of exotic
banality: a cliche Orient, a pasteboard Hong Kong of opium smugglers,
expensive prostitutes, rich perverts and double agents : it all has about
the same reality as glossy pages from
Harper's Bazaar.
It is the most
Rousselian of his novels : as Robbe-Grillet points out, Roussel preferred
to describe a reproduction rather than an original, to represent an
imita–
tion or reflection of reality and to fill his books with empty enigmas
-underground passages, concealed exits- which give them a gratuitous
(
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