PARTISAN REVIEW
271
If
prose fiction has indeed condescended to sacrifice spa–
tiality by virtue of an ulterior project for reclaiming the space of
the actual world, then Robbe-Grillet has undermined this aim by
claiming for the novel a spatiality as hard and absolute as that of
reality: thus a fiction that is hermetic and self-sufficient, having
relinquished its metaphorical connections as well as its meta–
physical claims.
In
the author's own words, it does not even aspire
to be conventionally realistic. Accepting its circumscribed fini–
tude, it places itself on the line, as it were, and thus expends itself,
leaving nothing extraneous to exact a subsequent claim upon
reality. As Roland Barthes expresses it, referring to Robbe-Grillet's
manner of presenting the object, it becomes "drained," "con–
sumed," "used up." Thus we end up with a form of fiction that
has succumbed entirely to its fictionality.
But can fiction ever . achieve a genuine autonomy in this
sense? There is of course a question of degree here. We cannot
properly speak of the ultimate autonorny of anything in the
world, unless, perhaps, we are to speak of Kantian
noumena.
"Autonomous" is a relative term. We think of objects, for ex–
ample, as autonomous insofar as we presume an enduring physical
world, but in the sense of things perceived and conditioned by the
understanding they cannot be strictly autonomous. With this con–
sideration any work of fiction can be called autonomous
in a
sense.
Certainly Robbe-Grillet has produced novels which uphold
an autonomy of a sort--in their focus on spatiality, the elimina–
tion of metaphor, and so forth. But this does not preclude the
possibility of considering their "autonomous" status from another
angle. The specific areas in which any prose fiction, including
Le
Voyeur
and
Dans Ie lab yrinthe,
falls short of autonomy are re–
vealed by the nature of the mental image itself, through which all
prose fiction makes its presentation. And even Robbe-Grillet, no
matter how geometrical and precise his descriptions of objects and
environments, cannot carry the hard space of the world over into
the "theater" of the reader's mind. The body is left out, and
where this concerns the reader's physical human body, which must
be excluded from any participation in the fiction, but which,
nevertheless, must act to sustain it (i.e., in holding the book in the
hands, turning the pages, and scanning the sentences with the
