SOURCE: “Alain Robbe-Grillet: Scientific Humanist,” in Bucknell Review, Vol. XV, No. 2, 1967, pp. 1-9.

[In the following essay, Wylie discusses the combination of humanist concerns and scientific observation in Robbe-Grillet's fiction. Noting the influence of Surrealism and existential philosophy on his work, Wylie writes, “For Robbe-Grillet the cosmos is neither absurd nor tragic; it simply is.”]

A return to stylistic experimentation sets Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman apart from their predecessors, the existentialists. Early criticism preoccupied itself with these technical innovations, with Robbe-Grillet's visual images and his striking use of language and vocabulary. This analysis seemingly considered subject matter of lesser importance or irrelevant. The truth is probably that early critics were unable to find a connecting link between Robbe-Grillet's themes and his literary technique. My description of the novelist as a “scientific humanist” is an attempt to provide this link.

By “humanist” I mean to describe any writer who concerns himself primarily with man and with those basic, unchanging problems which traditionally have been the province of literature, themes such as faith and despair, love, madness and war, freedom and creativity. The term “humanist” seems to have been first applied to various Renaissance scholars and philologists (Petrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, Luther, Montaigne) who sought to arrive at a comprehension of man through intensive analysis of language and elucidation of the basic texts of their civilization: the Bible and the “Classics.” These and later attempts to define man's essence by scholarly efforts unaided by recourse to revelation and dogma have given the term “humanist” the further implication of secular thought, of independence from any preconceived religious or political system.

By “science” I mean not only a certain attitude toward truth and knowledge but also a particular vision of reality and nature, even an emotional set toward matter and energy, toward the correspondence between mental and physical phenomena. Science as science is marked, usually, by a materialistic bias, by the implicit belief that man's frame of reference is the bio-physical world of matter and motion. Science may also be defined through its detachment and objectivity, by its desire to know through systematic and sustained observation, while humanism suggests a pursuit of human values and goals.

Trained as a plant pathologist and having spent several years in the patient study of the diseases of banana trees in the tropics, Robbe-Grillet as writer manifests both attitudes and approaches. He may be added to the company of notable figures to whom the label “scientific humanist” has been applied: Alfred North Whitehead, C. P. Snow, Teilhard de Chardin. He shares with them the belief characteristic of the scientific humanist that the hidden mainsprings of the material world are of critical importance to the understanding of our human condition, and that the relation of physical reality to our mental processes—perception and thought—is the key to knowledge and truth.

What then are the primary manifestations of this humanistic concern? It must be made clear at the outset that Robbe-Grillet's continuing interest in the natural sciences is an integral part of this humanism. For Robbe-Grillet the ultimate metaphysical problems are those of epistemology and ontology, of how can we have true knowledge of ourselves and our world. Robbe-Grillet has said that science is an essential instrument of our comprehension and has implied that the arts should make use of the latest scientific discoveries and techniques. Quantum theory, which demonstrates the dependence of physical phenomena on their observer, seems to interest the author particularly. Its definition of science is inclusive and fluid, allowing a vital communication between science and the arts. But the intellectual detachment of the scientist and his quest for objectivity are responsible for that stylistic precision and sharpness which set Robbe-Grillet apart from much that is shoddy in twentieth-century thought. Perhaps it would be fair to say that like Théophile Gautier and the Parnassians, Robbe-Grillet has bothered to master the technical problems of his craft and hence has attained the impersonal validity of the scientist. He prefers to remain silent rather than voice a half-truth or a provisionary truism.

The first problem attacked was the fundamental one of the nature of existence: the existence of man in his surroundings. This ontological problem was found to be inseparable from the problem of knowledge: how can man know his fellows and his environment? Thus in Les gommes Robbe-Grillet studies one man's attempt to penetrate misleading appearances and circumstances in order to arrive at a true understanding of a relatively simple situation. With irony the author depicts the two hermetic realms of material reality and the related mental processes which twist the exterior reality into a new entity. Especially important in this study of the nature of the mind and its dependence or independence of the material world is the typical “object” ; in Les gommes this is often a clue. Robbe-Grillet is fascinated with clues, and probably for this reason cast his first novel, Le voyeur, as a detective story. A material clue is for Robbe-Grillet closely related to the surrealist object as defined by Maurice Nadeau: “tout objet dépaysé” or “sorti de son cadre habituel.” A clue is no longer a mere gum eraser or piece of chalk but takes on a heightened existence, an immediacy, a human relevance. It serves as a link between man and the inert surroundings, as a correspondance in the Baudelairean sense. Perhaps this humanizing factor explains some of the continued popularity of Simenon, Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie.

Critics have realized the importance of these clues but have been at a loss to explain their value, since in the light of Robbe-Grillet's critical writings they have been hesitant to view them as symbols. The eraser, the famous quarter of tomato, the drawbridge serve to focus our awareness, to channel our psychic energy. A repeated image in Robbe-Grillet's works is that of a man rapt in meditation before a poster, a painting or a statue. It would seem that the individual is attempting to penetrate to ultimate reality through complete comprehension of even one banal, everyday object.

The natural scientist was soon forced to admit that both the problems of being and of knowing were essentially psychological. In the surrealist sense, in the sense proclaimed by Rimbaud, man's mind creates the universe around it, particularly the modern technological cityscape. So Robbe-Grillet broadened his perspective to take in the area of human creativity, especially as expressed in the labyrinthian architecture of modern life. Bruce Morrissette has noted that in Dans le labyrinthe it is the narrator and not the author who is the creator of this involved, convolute fiction: “le narrateur est occupé à l'élaboration d'une fiction destinée à composer une harmonie en soi, une sorte de ‘roman pur.’” We might say that Robbe-Grillet has given us an unusual illustration of existential man in the act of self-creation.

Now turning outward again we can see that the typical protagonist of Robbe-Grillet creates his own environment by his observation, his response to and interaction with it. This is most apparent at the beginning of Dans le labyrinthe, where, as James Lethcoe has remarked, the conflicting detail and the hesitancy in choice of tense represent either the narrator's fumbling attempts at imagining his tale or his difficulty in recounting a previous event. The mutual interaction and interdependence of man and his surroundings are also responsible for the baffling “false scenes” of which Robbe-Grillet is so fond. Perhaps Les gommes provides the best example; here the variant passages are most characteristically the detective's projections of various possible solutions to the ‘givens’ furnished by the clues.

Robbe-Grillet has insisted that his novels are not non-human and has pointed to the central presence of a perceiving, thinking protagonist in each of his works. This human presence is responsible not only for its own being and for the particular existence of its surroundings, as we have seen, but also for the action which ensues and for the evaluation of both the present situation and the future outcome. Time for Robbe-Grillet, as for Proust, is a living, changing thing; even the past is not fixed, dead. But increasingly Robbe-Grillet has turned toward the future. As we will see, hope has become an important element in the author's outlook.

Most of Robbe-Grillet's critics have refused to treat thematic or “philosophic” content in his works. Is it true, as Robbe-Grillet once seemed to say, that we can make no generalization about the discrete entities which surround us? Recurring images and themes, ideas repeated by his characters and key statements of his own in Pour un nouveau roman would indicate that certain objects, certain modes of action and perception, certain ideas are “privileged” in the Proustian sense or have an aura which detaches them from the purely meaningless. We have already noted the themes of contemplation and of creation, both involving the problem of comprehension. We might now briefly enumerate two other themes.

Foremost among those subjects which are given sustained treatment are love and sexual passion. Since Baudelaire and Proust few writers have presented such a polyvalent description of human affection and desire or have probed so deeply into their related motives and thoughts. Always the “realist” seeking a true understanding of a human phenomenon, Robbe-Grillet has not falsified what his observation has told him, has not evoked a sentimental or romantic picture of love. Instead he gives us without comment descriptions of passion, with all the bewildering complexity and demonic intensity of the emotion of Racine's Phèdre or Baudelaire's madonna. This love is often tormented or twisted, as in Le voyeur and La jalousie; but L'Anneé dernière à Marienbad is more full of hope in its suggestion that through the surrealist linking of love and revolt the lovers can win through to freedom.

The sustained analysis of love, transforming scientific case history into the archetypal patterns of art, reveals several humanistic implications. Love, for Robbe-Grillet, is often illusory or obsessive, the result of Freudian displacement of psychic energies caused by free association. Robbe-Grillet condemns self-deceit and hypocrisy in our efforts to picture romantic love. But he also seems to suggest—in the lovers of Marienbad and the spontaneous relation between the soldier and the boy of Dans le labyrinthe—that disinterested affection is possible and worth striving for.

A second major object of attention is the technological landscape with which man has surrounded himself. The traditional humanist has tended to look upon the modern with a biased eye, yearning to return to a simpler, sweeter, mythical past. Even Camus showed considerable prejudice in his hostility toward science and technology, a view which tends to falsify his analysis of what Lewis Mumford has termed “neotechnic” civilization. Robbe-Grillet accepts this new world as a given and projects his characters into it; the task of judging and evaluating both what is viable and what is harmful in it is largely left to the reader. The author, however, intimates that the joys and artifacts of the modern world are as valid for it as were other cultural manifestations for past societies. Perhaps a new humanism, in harmony with neotechnic science, engineering and art, is evolving to bring new order and meaning into our lives and our environment.

One example will illustrate both Robbe-Grillet's handling of the imagery of the neotechnic world and his characteristic “technological” lyricism:

Un groupe, immobile, tout en bas du long escalier grisfer, dont les marches l'une après l'autre affleurent, au niveau de la plate-forme d'arrivée, et disparaissent une à une dans un bruit de machinerie bien huilée, avec une régularité pourtant pesante et saccadée en même temps, qui donne l'impression d'assez grande vitesse à cet endroit où les marches disparaissent l'une après l'autre sous la surface horizontale, mais qui semble au contraire d'une lenteur extrême. …

This evocation of the métro escalator is followed by the description of a corridor and a man:

En dépit de la taille énorme du dessin et du peu de détails dont il s'orne, la tête du spectateur se penche en avant, comme pour mieux voir. Les passants doivent s'écarter un instant de leur trajectoire rectiligne afin de contourner cet obstacle inattendu. …

In dispassionate understatement the author muses on the perversity and freedom of man. Only one of these scurrying Dantesque voyagers of the underworld has stopped to reflect, to contemplate the modern Beatrice; but who knows? If Brunetto Latini, the poet Dante acknowledged as master, could sing in Hell, this solitary figure, disrupting the flow of harried souls, may resist even the subway.

The attempt, not to pigeonhole the author but rather to put him in the context of his age in relation to his predecessors, is difficult but important. The comparison with Camus and with the Surrealists is particularly rewarding. Robbe-Grillet undoubtedly studied at great length the work of Albert Camus, perhaps the leading French humanist and moralist of the past generation. In a detailed analysis of Camus' L'étranger, Robbe-Grillet points out the stylistic progression from a simple declarative prose at the beginning to increasingly involved and metaphoric language in the portrayal of the murder of the Arab: “La scène capitale du roman nous présente l'image parfaite d'une solidarité douloureuse: le soleil implacable est toujours ‘le même,’ son reflet sur la lame du couteau que tient l'Arabe ‘atteint’ le héros en plein front et ‘fouille’ ses yeux.” These subjective anthropomorphic metaphors, according to Robbe-Grillet, falsely humanize nature, and Camus’ famed absurde becomes a form of tragic humanism. Its multiple symbols will be Meursault the innocent victim, Sisyphus the plaything of the gods, and the rats of La peste. But Robbe-Grillet rejects, like André Breton, this acquiescence in a tragic view of man, this seeming conquest of the absurd by a new linking of man and nature through this solidarité douloureuse. For Robbe-Grillet the cosmos is neither absurd nor tragic; it simply is. With the Surrealists, Robbe-Grillet looks toward the future and hopes for an ultimate harmony with nature.

Thus it is up to man to impose both order and meaning on his surroundings. Although some of Robbe-Grillet's protagonists may seem passive, the most important—Wallas in Les gommes, the hunted soldier of Dans le labyrinthe, and X, the lover in Marienbad—are persistent in their effort to uncover or to create a moral and human truth. To Camus, who felt at home in the primitive culture of Algeria, man's state is fixed and unchanging, whereas to Robbe-Grillet man is constantly modifying the essence of his life through technological and cultural evolution. For Robbe-Grillet history is neither cyclical nor static.

Robbe-Grillet also rejects the existentialist idea of engagement in art, since he sees in Sartre's definition of commitment only the peril of didacticism. In the context of our definition of humanism, we might say that the artist directs his energies to creating forms or new “myths” which have only an indirect moral influence. The artist, like the scientist, must strive to maintain a certain detachment and impartiality in order, precisely, to function as artist. The artist or writer as humanist is neither partisan nor preacher. Robbe-Grillet's revival of the disinterested dedication, the intensity, of the art-for-art's-sake movement of the nineteenth century has been a fresh wind in our times.

The boldest and most sustained effort mounted in our own century to know ourselves and nature through art is that of the Surrealists: of Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Picasso. In rejecting traditional definitions and limitations of reality, they strove, in varying ways, to find new freedom, new strength for man in liberating the subconscious and creating a new mental and intellectual “super-reality.” This would be accomplished by reconciling the subconscious and conscious mind with our inanimate, indifferent world. Breton states in the Manifesto of Surrealism that the channel and form for this new harmony would be a fusion of art and science.

Robbe-Grillet is close to the Surrealists in his interest in artistic form and technique; he too is a literary technician and experimenter, a magicien ès lettres. His formal innovations lend a haunting musicality to his prose, the product of a characteristic density and texture closely related to those of the atonal serial music he describes in Marienbad. This musicality, however, is far from that of Verlaine. Here the volupté; is that of the gnarled and twisted tree: sharp and hard consonants replace the rather gooey vowels of Verlaine. The words are precise, objective, scientific and have a cerebral sensuality; typical are scrutigère, centimètre, rectiligne, périphérique, homogène, imperceptiblement.

Robbe-Grillet is close to the Surrealists too in his interest in Freud, in the subconscious and in dreams. Several critics have pointed out the presence of multiple layers of consciousness and the important roles played by the subconscious in both the observation and description of objects and in the cross-relations among them. It is really the subconscious which provides the missing links between scenes in a work by Robbe-Grillet. Kafka is one of the non-French writers to whom Robbe-Grillet turned for inspiration; the latter's work shows the influence of the fantastic, non-Aristotelian logic of his precursor. The dream-atmosphere of a Robbe-Grillet novel has been often noticed, particularly in Marienbad. There is always an aura of mystery, of strangeness, awakened by the immanence of obsessive images and by encantatory language. The surrealist force of the quarter tomato of Les gommes derives perhaps from the synthesis of these elements, whose essence is represented by the gelée verdâtre.

The last major bond between Robbe-Grillet and the Surrealists is their common rebellion against all forms of servitude and their quest for total freedom. For Robbe-Grillet the labyrinth is a recurring image of man's imprisonment; but the possibility of escape exists, and at times Robbe-Grillet suggests that his characters do or will escape from the enclosure of the room, the hotel, or the maze of city streets. Especially at the end of Marienbad is the hope of a definitive departure strong. Robbe-Grillet refuses any resignation and often returns to the potentiality of man finally breaking out of those restraints and frontiers which bind him. The true life will be fluid, an eternal flux, a life always looking forward: “vous étiez maintenant déjà en train de vous perdre, pour toujours, dans la nuit tranquille, seule avec moi.“

The open world of Robbe-Grillet is infinitely complex, a plenitude in which the reader can plumb the depths, can lose himself in the labyrinthian passages of this watery timeless realm. There is an addictive quality to these works; one runs the same danger of being engulfed here as in Proust's Combray. But like Theseus, we will emerge from the maze with new understanding and increased vigor.