SOURCE: “The Evolution of Narrative Viewpoint in Robbe-Grillet,” in Novel, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall, 1967, pp. 24-33.

[In the following essay, Morrissette examines the development of narrative perspective in Robbe-Grillet's fiction and films. According to Morrissette, Robbe-Grillet's “ingenious and constantly varying narrative modes cover almost the entire spectrum of current experimentation and practice.”]

1. EMERGENCE OF THEORIES OF “JUSTIFIED” VIEWPOINT

Two decades ago the question of narrative viewpoint seemed quite amenable to critical analysis; yet today it appears one of the most ambiguous and unresolved aspects of fictional structure. The elimination of the omniscient narrator and his replacement by posts of observation within the fictional field are steps in a well-known history: first, in the English tradition of narrative analysis, James and Lubbock argued on esthetic grounds for observers located within the framework of the novel; then, in the French tradition, Sartre offered a systematic philosophical defense of internal viewpoints, holding that Einsteinian relativity and existential views of knowledge justify relative “frames of reference” in fiction and the restriction of content to that present in a “framing” consciousness. But the apparent stability of a fictional geometry based on internally justified viewpoints proved illusory, and the prospect of rational coherence was of short duration. Indeed, we can see in retrospect that the novel had already rejected such tidy consistency. Soon it would proliferate with new narrative modalities, to return, astonishingly and unpredictably, to a kind of “omniscient” stance in which the reader himself is placed at the—often shifting—narrational focus.

Some of the main factors of instability that led to the abandonment of the novel of justified viewpoint lay, paradoxically, in the novel of the first person which had always seemed to call for little if any structural defense, because its straight-forward and automatically justified recital of events is given by a single character, a central or peripheral observer of the action, whose thoughts, observations, and other direct testimony constitute an unassailably coherent text. When the mode was further justified by the cadre of a diary, letters, or other pretexts of written documents it seemed to produce the maximum illusion of reality or authenticity, if not with respect to outer reality or the real universe, at least with respect to the fictional field. But already in the case of Proust, the “je”; or first-person mode had revealed unsuspected ambiguities (see Marcel Muller's recent study identifying as many as nine separate modes of “je” in the “narrative voices” of A la recherche du temps perdu); and André Gide in Les Faux-monnayeurs had played mirror tricks with the first person by introducing an inner novel or journal, while ironically reserving to himself the supposedly outmoded privilege of intervening as the “real” author. Meanwhile, the urgent claims of interior psychology had led to wide acceptance of interior monologue and stream of consciousness techniques which in most cases found no place within the logical schema of the novel of justified viewpoint.

To complicate matters further, the example of films and cinematic construction, which seemed at one time to strengthen the case for the objective novel (see the classic chapter on “Roman et cinéma” in Claude-Edmonde Magny's L'Age du roman américain), underwent an abrupt change. With the advent of what Raymond Borde calls the “cinéma de la vérité intérieure,” subjective viewpoints appeared on the screen with spectacular results, as in Hiroshima mon amour and L'Anneé dernière à Marienbad (not to mention the long prehistory of cinematic flashbacks, camera scenes shot from the viewpoint of a single character, contrapuntal soundtrack monologues, and the like). When mental content was projected on the screen, the last bulwarks of justified, pseudo-objective cinematic structure began to crumble. Both films and novels were entering a phase of ad hoc framing and découpage wherein each new work would create its own narrative perspective.

No contemporary author's works illustrate these tendencies and techniques more brilliantly than those of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose ingenious and constantly varying narrative modes cover almost the entire spectrum of current experimentation and practice.

2. ROTATION OF VIEWPOINT IN LES GOMMES (1953)

In this pseudo-detective story of a protagonist who repeats, without realizing it, an inverted and semi-parodied version of the myth of Oedipus, as he murders the “victim” whose death he is investigating, Robbe-Grillet sets out deliberately to destroy clock time (which he calls “linear and without surprises”) in favor of human time, the time that each man “secretes about himself like a cocoon, full of flashbacks, repetitions, and interferences.” Consequently, the author seeks also to present the contradictory versions of the same events that exist in a world of observational perspectives which he compares, following Sartre's lead, to Einstein's universe of multiple frames of reference. Such an intention explains, indeed almost necessitates, the use of a wide range of viewpoints in Les Gommes. The characters see the same décor from different angles, observe each other, witness and interpret according to their situations. (Robbe-Grillet's own comments on Les Gommes are preserved in a rare pamphlet, never republished.)

The specific narrative mode in most cases is a third-person pronoun, but one deepened and extended by use of Flaubertian indirect discourse and passages of interior monologue, as well as pseudo-objectification of conjectures, memories, and even hallucinations. The characters who “see” the scenes number about a dozen; they are, in order of their “appearance,” the following: the owner of the Café des Alliés, a focal point in the action; Garinati, the hired assassin; Juard, a shady abortionist who ministers to the “victim”; Marchat, a fearful friend of the intended victim; Laurent, the police chief; Wallas, the “special agent” who has been sent to solve the crime; Anna, the victim's maid; “Bona,” Jean Bonaventure, the ring leader of the band of political assassins; Mme. Bax, whose apartment overlooks the house of the crime; the drunkard who recites distorted versions of the riddle of the Sphinx; Mme. Jean, a postal employee; and Dupont himself, the intended and eventual victim of murder. Some of these “observe” only one or two scenes, but the principal characters, such as Wallas, Garinati, and Laurent, are interwoven into a complex design of different viewpoints.

In the case of Wallas especially, radically new techniques of objectifying the character's imaginings cause the ostensibly realistic framework of the third-person mode to collapse suddenly into visionary subjectivity. At times, pure inventions or speculations, such as Laurent's theory of the crime, are described as if actually occurring, as might befit the visualized hypothesis of a trained police chief. Along with the general pattern of rotating viewpoints there exist, consequently, the special techniques of mixed objectivity and subjectivity which Robbe-Grillet will in later novels employ apart from any arrangement involving multiple viewpoints.

One question of theoretical difficulty arising in Les Gommes is the following: if, in the novel, everything is seen or described from some particular character's viewpoint, how can such hidden allusions as those to the Oedipus myth, or to the Tarot cards, be communicated to the reader, if all the characters remain ignorant thereof? More importantly, how can such “metafictional” elements be tolerated at all? The answer must lie close to the basic paradox of all fiction. Reflection will show that the universe “observed” by the characters cannot be their own creation, in any real sense, but must emanate from the novelist, whether he “intervenes” visibly or not to make his presence known. It is he who determines what kind of universe will be observed by his characters; he can therefore hide, or partially reveal, at will, features recognizable by the reader but not by the characters. This intentionality is essential to the creation of any fictional field, since an opposing theory would necessarily fall into the realistic fallacy of a Zola, who tried to persuade himself and his readers that the fictional world he had created was somehow real, and subject to the same “scientific” laws as nature or society itself.

One additional narrative mode remains to be identified in Les Gommes. At first it appears to be an anomaly, if not a regression to outmoded omniscience or at least direct authorial intervention. It is the impersonal mode that appears here and there in passages that seem to come from nowhere or no one (“Un bras machinal remet en place le décor. Quand tout est prêt, la lumière s'allume …” etc.). The explanation, which does not justify the passages in the sense of fitting them into the pattern of observational viewpoints, shows them nevertheless to be structurally related to the conception of the particular novel. They are passages attributable to a “chorus.” The work, with its five chapters (acts), prologue, and epilogue parallels in form the divisions of a Greek tragedy, such as Oedipus the King, whose plot is also paralleled. In this regard, Robbe-Grillet has allowed formal, esthetic considerations to outweigh philosophical or metaphysical ideas concerning the relativity of time or viewpoint. Thus at the outset of his career, he reassumes authorial privileges which should be theoretically excluded.

3. SINGLE AND DUAL VIEWPOINT IN LE VOYEUR (1955)

Point of view in Le Voyeur has a paradoxical quality which analysis shows to be related to the theme and structure of the novel. Some critics have found in the work only a single focus, that of the protagonist Mathias, the traveling salesman who lands on an island to sell wristwatches to its inhabitants and departs several days later, after murdering, in a “suppressed” scene whose content is only gradually revealed, a young girl whose (probably) tortured body is thrown over a cliff into the sea. According to the unified view, the whole text (written in the third person) describes only Mathias’ perceptions and outlook on the surrounding world. But, as I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere, there are large blocks of text wherein Mathias is very definitely seen from the outside, long, “neutral” passages and developments incompatible with the single viewpoint theory. It is from these scenes that the paradox or ambiguity of narrative mode arises, and not from the mixing of real and imagined scenes in the sections of the text which do render the world and mind of Mathias through techniques of objectified subjectivity.

Assuming the correctness of this analysis (see my study Les Romans de Robbe-Grillet for a full treatment of the point), one may discover, on probing more deeply into the problem, the reason for the paradox as well as its solution. The fundamental structural intention served by the narrative mode of pseudo-objective third person is indeed that of incarnating the world of Mathias, a character “out of phase with himself,” a sadistic schizophrenic obsessed with visions of erotic violence. But to present this deformed universe, the author has need of an undeformed background against which the distortions, alterations, and other psychic projections of Mathias may be discriminated, measured, and judged. It is for this reason that Mathias is frequently observed and described from a point d'optique that cannot be his own (as, for example, when he is depicted looking downward) and that he is seen against a décor presented in a “style Robbe-Grillet” whose objects and other consistent elements (geometrical terms, scientific precisions, deceptive qualifiers, and the like) mark the general “manner” of the author (as, for example, in those descriptive portions of the scenario of Marienbad designed primarily for the director), and are not a style specifically adapted to the character's mentality. Moreover, when—in a fashion comparable to that of Faulkner when he presents the world through idiot Benjy's eyes—Robbe-Grillet creates a vision of the world distorted by Mathias’ psychopathology, it is this neutral, background universe that is distorted, and the style takes on a deformed, hallucinatory quality only by its relationship to the primary décor.

The well-known figure-of-eight object series of Le Voyeur illustrates how the two worlds, that of the stylized universe in which the protagonist exists and that of the visionary erotic sadist's mind, are linked. In the “background” world, the coiled cord, the marks of the iron rings on the quay, the pattern of eyes on the doors, the spirals of cigarette smoke, the adjacent rings left on the bar by wet glasses, and all the other 8's are coincidental forms such as any attentive observer, with an eye for geometrical patterns, might discern about him. But as they enter Mathias’ mind they become charged with morbid psychological tensions and sinister associations, and the reader begins to feel the upsurge of violent emotion, to recognize in these objects cords that may bind wrists, rings that could hold young limbs apart, bonds, watching eyes, and the whole repertory of obsessive objects found in the novel.

After a certain critical resistance, recent studies of Robbe-Grillet have come to agree with the analysis that finds Le Voyeur “organisé selon deux perspectives,” as Jean Alter has expressed it. What is important is to perceive that this dual perspective, that of the author and that of the protagonist, coincides perfectly with the novelist's intention to make the reader experience as directly as possible the disorientation of the schizoid mind, including a “blackout” or period of amnesic repression during which the crime is committed, a “hole” in the text during which the viewpoint entirely ceases to exist.

As the novel progresses, the point of view of Mathias (or his mental content) occupies more and more the volume of the text, so that the latter sections function in an almost pure single viewpoint mode. Even before that, as we have seen, when we speak of a dual viewpoint in Le Voyeur we do not mean one belonging to two narrators or fictional characters, but rather the opposition described between the author's “nominal,” stylized décor, and the personalized view of that world as apprehended in the mind of the protagonist. In a sense, the remarks made earlier concerning certain details of the author's world in Les Gommes, as opposed to the world of the characters themselves, apply to Le Voyeur.

4. SUPPRESSED FIRST-PERSON NARRATION IN LA JALOUSIE (1957)

Seeking a term to describe the innovation in narrative viewpoint invented by Robbe-Grillet in La Jalousie, I called the new mode that of the “je-néant,”; or absent-I. Without entering into the metaphysics of Sartrean néantisation and its relationship to the perceiving consciousness, the je-néant may be defined as a technique of the suppressed first-person in which all pronouns or forms associated with it (such as I, me, my, mine, and the like) are eliminated. The perceptions of the protagonist of the novel, a jealous husband who exercises an intense surveillance over his wife, constitute the “narrative,” which is expressed without perceptible self-reference. A central focus of vision is created, in a style related to that of the cinematic subjective camera, but lacking the first-person commentary on the sound track which typically accompanies the subjective sequences of films made in this mode, such as Lady in the Lake. A hole (Robbe-Grillet calls it a “creux”;) is created at the core of the narrative, and the reader installs himself therein, assuming the narrator's vision and performing, without verbal clues, all the unspoken and implicit interpretation of scenes and events that, in the conventional novel of psychological analysis and commentary, would normally be spelled out by the author or his character. Not only does the text embody the naked dynamics of the husband's perceptions of external events and objects; it also, as the incarnation of the magma of his mental content, contains secondary, associative materials, such as memories more or less deformed by emotional tensions, exaggerated visions of an erotic or paranoid nature (such as the paroxysmal image of the enlarged mille-pattes or centipede whose crushing carries the weight of the husband's dread of his wife's possession by another), and even purely hypothetical scenes of murderous wish fulfillment, such as the crash and burning of the car containing his wife and her presumed lover.

This esthetically fascinating and quite powerful effect, arising almost entirely through the special narrative mode employed, seems extraordinarily appropriate to a novel about jealousy. The husband's preoccupation is not with himself; he has, therefore, little reason for self-reference. What obsesses him is what his wife “A …” is doing, is planning to do, or has done, with the virile and aggressive Franck. He returns constantly to past scenes, reexamining them for clues as he visualizes them, and simultaneously transforming them and distorting them in line with his mounting suspicions. Sharing these visions through the technique of the je-néant, the reader feels, rather than thinks, jealousy. The wiping away of the conventional vocabulary of jealousy, as one would find it in Proust, for example, allows nothing to intervene between the phenomena that give rise to jealousy and the emotion itself. The reader's psychophysical responses take over. We may compare in this sense the text of La Jalousie and the essays in the “simulation” of psychopathological states, including paranoia, written by Breton and Eluard in L'Immaculée Conception during the surrealist period. The contrast between a novel like La Jalousie and a traditional novel of psychological analysis is paralleled by the contrast between the poetic texts of simulation of abnormal mental states and the texts found in conventional manuals of psychopathology, including Freud's and Stekel's, which embed the pathological experience and its visions in the rational context of an explanatory commentary.

Other writers of the nouveau roman, especially Claude Ollier and Jean Ricardou, have used the suppressed first-person mode to good effect. It would seem that the je-néant will enter the repertory of techniques of point of view (along with Michel Butor's “narrative you”) destined for future exploitation by many novelists. Looking back, one may now discern a link between Robbe-Grillet's je-néant and the partially suppressed first-person mode of the je in Camus’ L'Etranger. While there is in Camus’ novel no suppression whatever of the pronoun je (on the contrary, it becomes even obtrusive in its proliferation), Meursault's “I” appears as a pronoun of surfaces only, oddly lacking in depth or interiority. The protagonist of L'Étranger almost never “thinks,” or analyzes, and, like the husband of La Jalousie, he communicates his sense impressions at a more or less objective level. The reader quickly passes over Meursault's repeated je, so weightless is it. Suppression takes place behind the pronoun. It remained for Robbe-Grillet to erase the pronoun itself, and to create a wholly new mode.

5. THE HIDDEN AUTHOR WITHIN THE NARRATIVE FRAMEWORK: DANS LE LABYRINTHE (1959)

In the first sentence of Dans le labyrinthe, a “je” speaks. No further first-person form appears until near the end, in the phrase “à ma dernière visite,” and in the last sentence a departing narrator closes his text with the word “moi.” Thus, having announced himself at the outset, the narrator has retired from view (though we sense his presence in passages employing a type of je-néant mode), to reappear—but not fully, even then—as the novel closes. Yet as we become sensitive to his presence, we feel near him, in his small author's room, even when the action is taking place outside, in the labyrinthine streets where the soldier protagonist, ill or wounded, makes his way, from café to barracks to ambiguous apartments, carrying his box to the recipient whose identity he cannot remember, towards some forgotten rendezvous.

What has Robbe-Grillet gained by this narrative structure, involving the interior duplication of an author composing a novel? One could easily imagine another version of the novel in which the wanderings of the soldier, described more or less in the third-person style used here, would alone form the text. Even brief reflection should show that such a simplification would not only impoverish the novel; it would, in fact, negate its meaning. The author is obviously concerned less with the adventures of the soldier, pathetic as they may be, than with the relationship between the soldier's feverish story and the concealed inner author whose struggles in the labyrinth of novelistic creation form the real “subject” of the book.

The title is not “The Labyrinth,” but “In the Labyrinth.” Once the inner author, whose voice creates the novel, is seen as the real protagonist, the narrative viewpoint becomes clear, and the first-person frame is justified. As this writer attempts to build from the materials in his room (a steel engraving of a soldier in a café, a shoe box, a bayonet, etc.) a coherent novel, his stops and starts, revisions and alterations, give rise to the image of the labyrinth, an image not only of the maze of identical perpendicular streets in the story, but also of the labyrinthine verbal style of the text itself. The fact that towards the end of the work this narrator merges with the doctor who treats the dying soldier may be viewed as an effort finally to push the narrator himself into the story, in a fashion somewhat analogous to the re-entrant line in certain drawings of Steinberg, which, having emerged from the pen of an artist depicted in the sketch, rejoins eventually the figure of the artist himself. The effect is the opposite of that employed by Camus in La Peste, wherein Doctor Rieux, hitherto seen only as a third person, suddenly emerges as the first-person narrator, abandoning “il” for an unambiguous “je.”

In Dans le labyrinthe, Robbe-Grillet appears to adopt a kind of Mallarméan esthetics in which the creation of the literary work itself becomes the primary theme, lying beneath the fictional incarnation which may have its own anecdotal or pseudo-anecdotal value, as in L'Apres-midi d'un faune, or more strikingly, in Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard. Like Mallarmé's “ptyx”; sonnet, which the poet termed “allégorique de lui-même,” Dans le labyrinthe is in a sense analogical of itself. Since the intention was to devise a structure appropriate to a self-contained novel, the inner author and inner subject (duplicated in the engraving) seem perfectly justified, as do the pages lying on the table at the end, as the narrative voice leaves the room at last, uttering the final phrase, “derrière moi.”

Of particular interest to the study of the evolution of techniques of mode and viewpoint in Robbe-Grillet is the creation in Dans le labyrinthe of a new type of authorial intervention that permits, by means of an author placed within the fictional field, the use of free modalities of narration that would be impossible in the system of existentially justified viewpoints. Whereas the passages of abstract intervention in Les Gommes had to be explained in terms of formal imitation of the Greek dramatic chorus, such intervention now becomes part of the activities of a “creator” whose operations and maneuvers are at once the subject and the text of the novel itself. The relative “realism” of Le Voyeur and La Jalousie begins to disappear, in favor of a new constructionalism.

6. POINT OF VIEW IN THE FILMS: L'ANNEé DERNIèRE à MARIENBAD (1961) AND L'IMMORTELLE (1963)

The prefaces to these two films, as well as their structure and the camera angles which they employ, show them to be closely related, as far as viewpoint is concerned, to the novels of Robbe-Grillet's middle period, Le Voyeur and La Jalousie. (His latest film, Trans-Europ-Express, has not yet been shown in this country, or viewed by the present writer.) In the preface to Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet states that when two people converse, for example, what is present in their minds, as counterpart to the actual words of their dialogue, can only be visual or sensory images related to the topic under discussion. Thus mental content, which is primarily visual, becomes a natural narrative mode for the cinema, which can show the characters’ imaginings while retaining the same degree of “realism” in the décor and photography as that used in the “normal” scenes, if indeed any scenes may be thought of as existing apart from the characters' perceptions.

Consequently, if a character in a film remembers or imagines something, especially under the influence of emotion, the scene appears before us as it does in the character's own mind. Sometimes subtle alterations mark such an imaginary scene, but not as a clue to permit the discrimination between the real and the imaginary. The alterations must result from the tensions exerted by the character's emotions: thus the heroine's bedroom in Marienbad, recalled in great stress, appears in a heightened baroque style. When recalled scenes recur in L'Immortelle, they are deformed in accordance with the “narrator's” jealous scrutiny, in a technique exactly comparable to that employed in the written, rather than visual, text of La Jalousie.

Neither Marienbad nor L'Immortelle, however, uses a consistently justified system of viewpoint in the manner just described. In Marienbad, in addition to some scenes taken from an imaginary and “impossible” angle high in the air, there are shots wherein the mingling of two viewpoints occurs, as when the lover X “intervenes” (verbally) in the vision he evokes in the heroine's mind of the seduction scene, and which we see through her eyes. In both Marienbad and L'Immortelle two or more characters appear twice in different parts of a panoramic camera movement, creating a strange effect of continuity between two moments of time and two spatial locations which on a realistic level could not be proximate. Nor is it always possible to “linearize” such shots by assuming them to consist of memories or imaginings within a single mind. As with the “chronological impasses” of La Jalousie, one senses in Robbe-Grillet an impatience with the limitations of the justified system and a tendency to reclaim authorial rights over point of view, to replace the old doctrine of the omniscient author by a new but in a sense similar one that would place the point of view not necessarily within a given character, but in the spectator (or author) himself. The novelist demands a creative freedom not possible within the theoretical limits of the James-Sartre system.

The extent to which Robbe-Grillet's ideas and practices had changed by 1963 may be measured by referring to the short article he published in 1958 bearing the long title, “Notes sur la localisation et les déplacements du point de vue dans la description romanesque.” Therein we find almost complete support for the visually justified viewpoint, and the cinema is held up as an example to the novel, since the film, “whether or not there is a person from whose viewpoint the scene is shot, must absolutely be shot from some precise point,” and this post of observation must be that of a man, either one within the fictional frame, or one placed at a possible vantage point. But within a few years the new novelist-deity of Robbe-Grillet will compensate in creative freedom for what the old Balzacian author-god had lost in omniscience and protean viewpoint. The justification will move from within the characters to the form or structure of the novel itself.

7. INTERPLAY AND ENTANGLEMENT OF NARRATIVE VIEWPOINT: LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS (1965)

In his latest novel, Robbe-Grillet employs a number of apparently new techniques, not only of viewpoint but also of plot structure. These may, however, be shown to be developments and intensifications of practices already discernible in his earlier works, and represent outgrowths of tendencies whose evolutionary possibilities may be identified retrospectively, even if they were not clearly predictable.

The common principle uniting these innovations is what may be termed reentry or infolding, a procedure which causes both point of view and story line to turn in upon themselves, with metamorphoses and transfers occurring not only backward and forward in time, but also between characters. Though the closest anticipation of the technique is the inner author's assumption of the role of the doctor mentioned above in Dans le labyrinthe, the origins of the mode may be traced back as early as Les Gommes, where the transitions, however, appear easily detectable, as the viewpoint moves from person to person, and where the temporal junctions, when non-linear, involve no serious “dechronology.” With La Jalousie the viewpoint never changes, but the temporal reversals and impasses, with the altered reiterations of scenes, create something of the contradictory quality of the structure of La Maison de rendez-vous. An example in La Jalousie is the passage in which Franck replaces on an adjacent table a drinking glass in which the ice has completely melted. A few lines further, we read that one melting ice cube remains. We soon realize that two different moments of time have merged in the narrator's mind, linked by associative tensions, and the apparent impossibility is resolved. In La Maison de rendez-vous no such resolutions will exist for such non-linear transitions. Thus the fleeing protagonist Johnson, escaping the police by going through a hotel and out the back way, continues on to commit the very crime for which he was being pursued. Not only this—the crime itself occurs more than once, and each time under different circumstances: not theoretically, as in Les Gommes (where several characters visualize the same crime according to their separate hypotheses), or through imaginary projections, like those of Mathias in Le Voyeur (as he creates fantomatique scenes of selling watches to the same clients, etc.), but literally, or, at least, textually.

Accompanying this change is an extension of the device of the “initial I” used in Dans le labyrinthe. A first person appears and reappears, but its accounts of events merge with virtually verbatim repetitions attributed to another character, such as Johnson. Robbe-Grillet progressively establishes what amounts to a state of viewpoint; justification is not only abandoned, but distorted and negated so violently that the reader acquires or shares a kind of omnipresence similar to that of certain dreams. If, as its author has stated, La Maison de rendez-vous is indeed the house of our imagination, it is a domain in which the reader, with the novelist, feels free to create whatever structures of space, time, and action he wishes.

In her excellent analysis of the non-linear aspects of this novel (see Etudes, March 1966), Mme. Mireille Latil-Le Dantec quotes from one of my articles my formulation (here translated) of the “eternal question of the novel”: “What justifies or explains the existence of a narrative text, this deceitful text which pretends to be plausible, which comes to us from somewhere, from someone who speaks from a hidden or ambiguous place, and who presents us with an ever stranger novelistic universe, structured according to the perspectives of his evermore polymorphous point of view?” Mme. Latil-Le Dantec replies that La Maison de rendez-vous seems to offer to this basic question of the justification of viewpoint, “the proudest of replies,” namely, that “Nothing justifies the narrative text other than itself. It seeks no vraisemblance, deriving its truth only from itself. It comes from nowhere. It is a mental space, the rendezvous of viewpoints successively adopted or abandoned by an imaginaire who has no support other than himself, and who creates his own world.”

Must we admit, then, that the omniscient author of Balzac, driven from the house of fiction by a score of novelists from Flaubert and James to Sartre, has returned through the back door of La Maison de rendez-vous? Are dechronology, entangled and shared viewpoints, and non-linear structures only a modern form of the older mode? Careful reflection and analysis will show, I believe, that it is not a case of Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The Balzacian omniscient author played his god-like role in a world of characters offered as Aristotelian imitations of life. Even the scientific pretensions of a Zola implied a transfer from fiction to reality itself. But in Robbe-Grillet's latest work we enter a domain of psycho-fiction, akin to that of Mallarméan poetry or the invented novelistic world of Raymond Roussel, with its formal schematics and its principles of self-generating content and self-contained structure. It remains to be seen whether Robbe-Grillet's future novels and films will evolve further in this direction, and to what extent these new developments will be accepted as authentic fictional techniques, or regarded as over-elaborate, byzantine projects of concern to only a small group of specialized readers. At present, La Maison de rendez-vous leads all of Robbe-Grillet's novels in sales and public acclaim. Even if some of this popularity may be attributed to erotic elements in the book, or to its pseudo-James Bond atmosphere and plot, we may still detect a willingness to accept, in fiction, some of the same formal liberties and absence of conventional justifications that prevail in modern pictorial styles (from abstract to op) and musical compositional methods (from serial to chance). A McLuhanite or a disciple of George Steiner might argue that the phenomenon is related to the breakdown of language, or at least the breakdown of the old rhetoric of fiction in the direction of the non-rational, if not the non-verbal. To so argue would be in one sense a paradox, since works like La Maison de rendez-vous have a stylistic intricacy and polish that set them apart from the “revolution of the word” syntax of lettrism, beat poetry, post-Joycean free association, syllabic interplay, mangled texts à la William Burroughs, or other symptoms of that retreat from reality which now, according to Steiner, “begins outside the verbal language.” One thing at least seems assured: the nouveau roman, in the hands of Robbe-Grillet and other experimentalists, continues to promise evolutionary surprises.