SOURCE: “The Nature of Postmodern Time in Jorge Luis Borges's ‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero’ and Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Man Who Lies,” in The New Novel Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring, 1997, pp. 50-65.

[In the following essay, Fragola compares the concept of time in works by Borges and the French New Novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet.]

Alain Robbe-Grillet acknowledges that Jorge Luis Borges's short story “Theme of the Traitor and Hero” influenced him in making the 1968 film, The Man Who Lies (Fragola and Smith, 62). The most obvious connection lies in the theme of the double in the hero/traitor dichotomy that functions as the basic structure of both works, yet an equally important similarity can be found in their postmodern concept and manipulation of time. Ermarth identifies the subversion of historical time as one of the salient aspects of postmodernism. “The humanist construction of time is historical, and postmodern writing subverts this temporality and its projects” (7). Artists who are postmodernists seek to provide alternatives to the notion of historical, linear time. Although Borges and Robbe-Grillet provide similar alternatives to historical time, Robbe-Grillet offers a greater elaboration of their postmodern concepts.

For Borges, “time is the central problem of existence” (Alifano, 24), and within his stories time is characterized “as a multi-dimensional web of plural realities” (Ermarth 67). Illustrating Robbe-Grillet's own preoccupation with the subject, Boris, the central figure in The Man Who Lies, engages in a struggle against time as a central feature of his existence. In Borges's story, Ryan investigates the nature of the death of his great-grandfather, Fergus Kilpatrick, who is considered to be a hero of the Irish Resistance. Ultimately, Ryan discovers that Kilpatrick had betrayed the cause. Condemned to death by his co-conspirators, Kilpatrick devises an elaborate plot whereby his death by their hands enables him to be portrayed as a hero. Kilpatrick thereby atones for his guilt and furthers the cause he has compromised. The structure of the story is circular; when Ryan discovers the truth of this betrayal and the dual nature of his great-grandfather, he keeps his discovery a secret. When he publishes a book dedicated to the hero, Ryan understands that all was predestined and he too has become a part of the plot (127).

Borges's literary structure illustrating that all of man's actions are foreordained is based on the concept of circular time (Ayora 147). In his “A New Refutation of Time” Borges also “denies the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked” (50). He derives his refutation of time as a continuum from the belief that a single repetition of any event undermines and destroys succession and the notion of history (61). In the story Ryan discerns that the facets of the assassination are cyclical (124). Circular patterns abound, including the prefigurement of Kilpatrick's death in the tragedies of Julius Caesar and Macbeth. “These parallels (and others) in the history of Caesar and the history of an Irish conspirator induce Ryan to assume a secret pattern in time, a drawing in which the lines repeat themselves” (124). “He thinks that before the hero was Fergus Kilpatrick, Fergus Kilpatrick was Julius Caesar” (125). Later it will be shown that Robbe-Grillet's constant repetitions suggest a similar disruption of the time continuum. Borges postulates that time consists of unconnected individual moments that coexist. “Time does not exist outside each present moment” (60). Within the circularity of Borges's structure exists the simultaneity of individual moments, with neither past nor future, only the immutable present.

A concept of dream time that appears throughout Borges's work can be found in The Man Who Lies. The time of dreams cannot be measured, and dream time exists only in the mind of the dreamer. Borges uses the example of Chuang Tzu, who dreams that he is a butterfly. “During the course of that dream,” writes Borges, “he was not Chuang Tzu but a butterfly” (61). The inability to connect his dream moments to waking moments precludes linkage of the dream to Chinese history. Dream time can be viewed of as ahistorical time; it exists outside of linear time, space, and history, but within the imagination, the unconscious.

Borges's circular structure provides a generalized framework for the story that is not rigorously maintained within the work. The repetitions of the events serve to undermine the dominant notion of succession. In denying succession Borges also rejects causality, yet Ryan's investigation is linear and causal in that one discovery leads to another. Only at its conclusion does the story ultimately return to its beginning. Robbe-Grillet's circular structure for The Man Who Lies is far more complex than that found in Borges's story, in part, because Robbe-Grillet is working with a longer medium—the feature-length film—that allows him more “time.” “Theme of the Traitor and Hero” is only four pages. Borges often presents stories as a form of film treatments which invite the reader to participate with the mind's eye and embellish with greater detail and complexity. In The Book of Sand Borges concludes: “I hope that these hasty notes I have just dictated do not exhaust this book and that its dreams go on branching out in the hospitable imagination of those who now close it” (125). The primary focus of this paper is on Robbe-Grillet, for Borges's depiction of time in “Theme of the Traitor and Hero” is far less elaborate than its complexity in The Man Who Lies.

Before examining structure, some differences and similarities between time in film and literature need to be outlined. First, as J. T. Fraser states, the notion of time is derived from language, which, in his view, serves as a means of combating the finality of death and achieving immortality. “The extension of temporal horizons, from the immediate future and past to beyond death and before birth, would not have been possible without human language. … The very ability to speak a human language demands a command of human time” (15). The verbal constructs of language are used to denote a past and future, but Fraser believes that cosmic time exists independently of human time, or noetic time. Fraser characterizes noetic time, or nontemporality as “the temporal reality of the mature human mind. It is characterized by a clear distinction among future, past, and present; by unlimited horizons of futurity and pastness; and by the mental present, with its changing temporal horizons, depending on attention” (367). Borges's works are in a written language that adheres to conventions such as the maintenance of verb tenses that are artificial constructs; consequently, he is more limited in his means of exploring time. Because Robbe-Grillet has at his disposal sound and images, as well as language, he has greater latitude in subverting the notion of representational time.

In “Theme of the Traitor and Hero” Borges uses past tenses. He may write of simultaneity and create circular structures, but he is bound by his material—written language. As Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth argues in her study of time in the postmodern novel, language is confined to history because of tenses (140). Borges cannot easily, for example, describe past events while simultaneously writing about others that take place in the present or are projected into the future. Because cinema is comprised primarily of images and sounds, Robbe-Grillet can be free from the constraints of written language. He can speak of the past while presenting an image that takes place in the present or is a flashforward to the future. Sounds within the same shot, the basic unit of film, such as those of a woodpecker, glass shattering, or a tree falling can refer simultaneously to past, present, or future. Meanwhile, the technique of voice-over narration of the protagonist Boris, played by Jean-Luis Trintignant, allows Robbe-Grillet to explore possibilities that spoken language offers. Boris speaks of past events while through montage images are seen in the present, thereby illustrating the tension between the past of language or history and the presentness of the image.

Although Robbe-Grillet is free to explore cinematic time, he, like Borges, must work against certain restraints. But, as he states, it is “the resistance of material that characterizes all creativity” (Ghosts 10). The first given he confronts is the progression of film at a measurable and constant rate of 24 frames per second as it passes through the projector's gate. Second, the running time of the film, 98 minutes, also a man-made construct, imposes limitations. Within these confines Robbe-Grillet attempts to manipulate film to create both finite and cosmic time. Furthermore, perception of motion in film is in itself an illusion. The phenomenon of perceived motion in film has been traditionally explained by the theory of the Persistence of Vision in which the image of a single frame is maintained in the eye for a fraction of a second until the next image appears, thereby creating the illusion of continuous motion. Although this theory is now being challenged, its basic tenet still holds true. The only image we actually see at the moment is that of a single frame. What we perceive as a continuous succession of images is really only a series of disconnected images moment by moment, in the present. We impose noetic time onto these images.

Conventional narratives would bring about the resolution of the traitor-hero contradiction that functions as the primary structural principle of The Man Who Lies, but as Carol Murphy indicates, “The [T]ruth of the film lies elsewhere; its narrative and filmic structures are based on sustaining, rather than on the resolution, of contradictories” (39). For the purpose of orientating the reader, Murphy describes the events of the film as “situated in time several years after an unidentified war” (Murphy 37). Yet even this statement is problematic.

In the opening sequence we see soldiers wearing uniforms of the German Wehrmacht moving towards the camera as a figure, Jean-Luis Trintignant, who calls himself Boris Varissa, a.k.a. the Ukranian, runs away. Because of the continuity of direction we assume that the soldiers are pursuing Trintignant. Moreover, other apparent continuities suggest a linking of the soldiers to him. When, for example, a soldier fires a machine gun, Trintignant dives for cover. Yet two elements suggest these actions are false continuities that displace linear time and adjacent space which are the underpinnings of the concept of continuity. Trintignant's modern suit does not conform to the time period of the soldiers' uniforms. More importantly, Trintignant and the soldiers never appear in the same frame. Since neither Trintignant nor the soldiers are fixed in historical time it is possible that one does not predate the other. Boris and the soldiers may co-exist in discrete moments of time, thereby undermining the notion of succession, which Borges equates to time itself (Alifano 62).

Another detail that Robbe-Grillet includes further undermines the spectator's ability to fix time. Later in the film a German Wehrmacht officer is seen reading Pravda in Roman rather than Cyrillic letters. Robbe-Grillet points out that the Roman version could have appeared only after the occupation, yet East German officers of the Warsaw Pact who were part of the occupational forces of Czechoslovakia when the Prague Spring erupted could have been wearing those same Wehrmacht uniforms (Fragola and Smith 48). The soldier concurrently seems to be part of the past as well as the future, which historically is already the past. Boris does not necessarily arrive after a war. Boris's arrival and the soldiers in the forest are discontinuous, linked only through Boris's inventions, and the veracity of his stories are constantly called into question or belied by the images. By keeping both Trintignant and the soldiers separate, Robbe-Grillet creates two distinct entities co-existing as discrete moments in time. The spectator establishes connections. As our minds create continuities, so do “our minds order the universe by human time” (Fraser 274).

In Ghosts in the Mirror, where Robbe-Grillet conceives of reality as discontinuous and being composed of elements juxtaposed at random (160), he supports the view that man creates continuities where none exist. This concept parallels Borges's belief, presented in “A New Refutation of Time,” that “each moment we live exists, not the imaginary combination of these moments” (51). To give meaning and structure to his life, man creates order from randomness. Boris fabricates stories that appear to be lies, but essentially there are no lies, only myriad combinations and permutations of these realities, all equally true, for no one single truth exists.

In the first sequence of The Man Who Lies Robbe-Grillet does not fix the actual time of day, part of the natural phenomenon of the cyclical rhythm of the sun and moon that helps humans to form notions of time. The soldiers carry lanterns, but when we see Trintignant it is light. At the end of the sequence, when he is finally “killed”—just one of many times—it is not day but night, and he awakens at day. Thus the division between day and night, the real and false, are not clearly defined. Robbe-Grillet has called into question man's relationship to time in the natural universe.

Throughout the film, what appears to be fixed in time may be merely an illusion. As Boris enters the village we see flash cuts, nearly subliminal, of a woman's head of hair filling the screen and women playing blind man's bluff. These flash cuts are not fixed in time nor space. They are not necessarily shots from the past, nor the future, but seem to represent images that exist for the moment, in the moment, not linked by causality to any other images. The connections that the spectator will make later between these images and Trintignant are prompted by the human inclination to establish causality, as expressed by Boris's inventions. The spectator has no way of knowing whether Boris has any prior knowledge of Jean Robin, the Resistance hero; it may be that he fabricates narratives from contradictory fragments of what he hears and sees. “He is dead.” “He is alive.” As Armes shows, we do not even know if his name is really Boris (102). That, too, may be his first fabulation to establish a past reality for himself. It is possible that prior to his entering the village Boris did not exist. Through his narratives he creates a past for himself. This position is consistent with Robbe-Grillet's comment on Last Year at Marienbad in For A New Novel that the only reality the characters have is that which we see on the screen during the projection of the film, “for the only time that matters is of the film itself” (153). The characters in The Man Who Lies have no real past. Once the film ends, Boris ceases to exist.

Another way that Robbe-Grillet undermines noetic time in The Man Who Lies can be found in the way he structures the narration itself and by his presentation of detail within that structure. As noted, an inherent contradiction exists between language with its tenses and film which is seen only in the present tense. Some cinematic markers such as soft focus and dissolves may indicate a return to the past, but the images always remain in the present and Robbe-Grillet disdains those types of obvious indicators (Fragola and Smith, 149). What interests him is the maintenance of past, present, future and imaginary on the same level. Underscoring the dichotomy between language and film, Robbe-Grillet says, “Any other process that tries to reestablish temporality is a process that reveals a nostalgia for literature since literature possesses the entire range of grammatical tenses” (Fragola and Smith 149).

Other techniques that Robbe-Grillet employs to undermine the notion of continuous time is the use of freeze frames, repetitions, and jump cuts. Inside the Inn the men assume frozen positions, as in freeze frames. Subsequent actions of the chemist and soldiers are immobilized by actual freeze frames. Borges believes that a single repetition undermines the notion of succession. A freeze frame is a repetition of a single image for a specified number of frames that can be measured in time. Following Borges's logic, freeze frames destroy the concept of succession. Instead, each moment is separate, discontinuous.

In The Man Who Lies, other repetitions abound. Although they constitute a variation on a theme, the stories Boris fabricates are in themselves repetitions. When being interrogated, Boris takes off and puts on his jacket four times, a comic bit that parallels postmodern playfulness with language. In standard narratives the author is expected to bring about a resolution, but in postmodern narratives digression and open-endedness are virtues. The postmodern intention is not to arrive at a predetermined point fixed in historical time, but to be engaged in and delighted by the process itself: “to engage attention not in plot and character or other forms of meaning production but instead in the patterning process of repetition and variation as it extends along a linguistic sequence shadowed by other states and modes” (Ermarth 157). After a showing of The Man Who Lies a viewer accustomed to standard historical narrative might ask, “What is the point?” Boris has no intention of “telling the truth” and bringing his story to a conclusion, thereby fixing himself for all time in history. Boris's stories digress and contradict and circle back upon themselves. “The ‘point’—or rather the fun—of this is in its accumulation of instances, which in the end present a meaning that digresses from any summarizable point; and that is the point” (183).

Robbe-Grillet also uses jump cuts to undermine the notion of time as succession. In the bell tower, for example, Boris looks up to see Jean Robin on a rafter. Alarmed, Boris begins to ring the bell. Intercut with his actions are shots of Jean in various locations of the tower. These images are not linked by causality and succession, but through associations and dislocations in time. They are images purportedly from the past, existing in the present. Isolated from any continuous narrative, they appear only for the moment, disrupting Boris's continuity of action and narrative. Boris uses the past tense to describe the subsequent story, but it is doubtful that the events ever happened in the past. They exist only as products of Boris's inventions at the moment. Robbe-Grillet creates a dichotomy between language and images. Furthermore, by utilizing repetition and jump cuts, Robbe-Grillet illustrates Borges's theory that succession and history are artificial constructs. If Boris lies, then so does the viewer who fabricates connections from these disparate images.

The overall pattern of time in The Man Who Lies conveys the philosophical implications of the film. Robbe-Grillet explains that the figure of Boris is, in part, based on the figure of Don Juan. “The myth of Don Juan is significant in the film, for he is one of the first figures in the history of Western civilization to have chosen his own word against the word of God” (Fragola and Smith 42). Furthermore, in Ghosts in the Mirror, Robbe-Grillet points out that for Don Juan “truth can only exist in the present moment, his truth, as against God's truth, which is eternal” (56). Unlike Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Boris is not searching for an author but a story. As the author of his own narratives and histories he has supplanted God. The tension between these two times—the present moment and its opposite, eternity—mirrors the basic architecture of The Man Who Lies which is constructed on “the generalized division of any sign into its inverse, as with the ‘characters,’ the main actor: Boris/Robin” (Ghosts 58).

Since Boris is not fixed in time and he has died and has been resurrected, as he will die and be resurrected repeatedly in the movie, it is possible to see Boris as a ghost who enters the village and tells stories. In order to escape death, ghosts must remain in the moment. In the conventional view, immortality exists outside of historical time, beyond the past, present, or future. From a postmodern perspective, transcendence or immortality does not exist beyond the present moment. “So to construct a narrative would be a more or less conscious bid to outwit death” (Ghosts 19). In the postmodern view, life is immortal only while it is being lived. By immersing himself in the present, Boris seeks to escape from the finality of death and non-being. Time only exists within the immutable present, and Boris creates stories to prolong his immortality. Borges's characters also seek to outmaneuver death, but to a different end. In “Theme of The Traitor and Hero” Kilpatrick creates his own narrative to achieve immortality in historical time, whereas Boris seeks to evade a conventional concept of immortality for the immortality of the present moment. The subtext of The Man Who Lies can be found in Boris as a leader of the Resistance against the concept of historical time.

As a ghost, Boris tells stories to fix himself in time, in the present, yet even his language is suspect and the images belie the veracity of his words. Boris says, “I went straight to the Inn which was empty that time of day,” yet the Inn is crowded with people. Boris also speaks of the past as a time of barbed wire, check points, and sentries, but we never see these images in the moment he describes them. Even the dialogue undermines the notion of a fixed time. When referring to the disappearance of Jean Robin, one man says it was two years ago, another says three. Discrepancies persist. Boris may be lying or has forgotten the exact time, but the possibility remains that he is speaking of two separate moments of time derived from fragments of dialogues that oppose each other. Moreover, although he speaks in the past tense his stories are illustrated in projected images in the present tense that underscore the past-present dichotomy, for as Susanne Langer states, “the tense of subjectivity is the ‘timeless’ present” (268).

In his Study of Human Time, Georges Poulet's insights into the plight of modern man can be applied to Boris's obsessive lying. Poulet sees modern man's condition as one of constant change that is an act of creation in the mind. “Each instant appears as the instant of a choice, that is to say of an act; and the root of this act is a creative decision. Every instant one acts one creates his action, and together with it one creates oneself and the world” (35). By controlling the narrative and inventing stories, Boris creates himself in the world. His stories serve to establish his reality in the world. To evade eternity, Boris must continuously change his story in order to maintain himself in the present. Yet before he can create himself in the present, he must first annihilate time with its past and future. “The creative act of time appears first then as a death of time itself” (Poulet 36). The visual corollary to the death of time is Boris's own death. He must die in order to be reborn in an act of on-going creation in the present moment.

Perhaps Boris is not lying at all. Instead, “each instant the hero forgets what he was in order to become as he wishes” (Poulet 36). We assume Boris lies because his stories change. He is also an actor, and an actor lies and tries to convince us of the veracity of his story. There is not one truth, but many truths, not one story, but many stories. Because he cannot remember his story, he must invent a new one. Boris's reality is constantly shifting. Before he can construct a new narrative he must annihilate himself in the past to be reborn in the present. When Boris succeeds he can be reborn. With the destruction of himself within historical time, the time of language, as either a traitor or a hero, as Boris or Jean, he can create a new identity as someone who exists in the moment, for “[t]o exist in historical (‘unauthentic’) time is to exist as nobody …” (Ermarth 41). Robbe-Grillet's inclusion of applause recorded during one of Pirandello's plays seems to suggest that he is rewarding the actor for again triumphing over time.

These invented stories circling back upon themselves form the superstructure of time in The Man Who Lies. In the initial sequence Boris actually circles back towards the camera, kneels, and looks toward it, as though looking in the direction of the soldiers. Then he rises and heads back into the forest. This circling back prefigures the basic design of the film in which stories begin and develop in a linear fashion, only to end and circle back upon themselves in a new variation.

The progression from the linear to the circular is consistent with the general theory of relativity which holds that 3-D space is both limited and unlimited, linear and circular. Paradoxically, while being linear it curves back upon itself (Fraser 257). One explanation “allows us to hop on a light beam, rush along its straight trajectory and find ourselves back where we started” (Fraser 263). Robbe-Grillet's manipulation of narrative and time in The Man Who Lies follows this model. Addressing an audience at Washington University in St. Louis on October 9, 1992 after a showing of La Belle Captive, Robbe-Grillet said that man's life is paradoxically both circular and similar to a bridge that he must travel across. He does not know where the bridge leads but he must cross it. Time in The Man Who Lies follows Robbe-Grillet's view that is similar to the theory of relativity whereby time is paradoxically both circular and linear. Each instance Boris is killed he is resurrected and the story resumes with a new variation. What has seemed to be the straight trajectory of a classical narrative structure has proven to be circular.

At the end of the film Jean “kills” Boris, who, of course, gets up and proclaims, “Now I'm going to tell you my real story, or at least I'm going to try.” A picture of Jean, frozen in time, comes to life, but now Jean, with Boris's voice, claims that he is Boris. Robbe-Grillet presents us with a mirror image of the two figures reminiscent of the ending to Borges's “Theme of the Traitor and Hero.” Before the hero was Boris Varissa, Boris Varissa was Jean Robin. Duality and circularity are thus preserved. Boris (now Jean) is expelled from the village and retreats into the forest where he is driven away from the camera, as though in another direction in time. Thus Robbe-Grillet's structure of The Man Who Lies resembles Borges's circularity, but it is more like a series of intersecting circles that mirror the theory of relativity.

Boris circles back upon himself because he is aware that he can live only in the moment, the present. To lose control of the moment is to sink into eternity or death, non-being, his ghostly self. As long as Boris can exert control over the narrative he exists safely in the present. During Boris's dream when his rational processes are no longer in control and he enters into what might be called dream time or ahistorical time he no longer dominates the narrative. As Armes explains:

The balance shifts with the execution of Boris, and he loses his hitherto privileged status as a narrator. His second entry in to the château … leads only to a nightmare which contains a summary of many of the major stages of his progress (the forest, the blindman's bluff, the shattering of glass which marked his first entry into the château) but no reference to Jean. Subsequently he is expelled by Jean's father, who twice refuses to listen to him.

(105)

These stages that Armes indicates also represent different time states. Boris's dream sequence illustrates the complex interplay of time that Robbe-Grillet creates within the larger superstructure of circularity. The threads of various narratives are presented within the context of his dream, but removed from the context of continuous narrative and space. The image presented cannot be fixed within the boundaries of a definable time.

The dream sequence begins in the forest where Boris whips Maria with a branch. The action is continued through time and space with a cut to Boris slapping Maria. As they caress one another, Sylvia appears in the doorway. Shots of Sylvia and Boris with Maria are intercut. At first the shots of Sylvia seem intrinsic to the scene. They appear to occupy the same space and time but since we never see a shot of the three figures together Sylvia could exist within her own moment of time, juxtaposed to Boris and Maria. The artificiality of the poses that Sylvia strikes suggest that she may be present only in Boris's mind.

The image of the innkeeper is without context. He belongs to an earlier segment that is associated with the threat of the forest (Armes 97). Since the narrative begins with Boris in the forest and ends with his being driven back to it, the dream sequence that Robbe-Grillet places in the middle of the narrative acts as the fulcrum in the shift in Boris's control. Armes divides The Man Who Lies into 45 segments and shows that the dream sequence is segment 23, the pivotal point in which the narrative changes. From the innkeeper Robbe-Grillet cuts to Boris and Maria but with the sounds of dogs barking juxtaposed against the narrative. From that shot Robbe-Grillet cuts to soldiers at night with dogs. The overlapping sounds of the dogs may come from the initial sequence and prefigure the subsequent images of the soldiers with the dogs. Thus past and future are blended into the present. The intercutting between Boris and Maria during their sexual encounter and the images of soldiers and dogs create an illusion of past and future images and sounds co-existing, yet it must be remembered that even this is a filmic illusion created by man's innate propensity to create continuities where none exist. Each image is seen for its duration upon the screen. That image is succeeded by another image and from this succession the spectator creates either a juxtaposition or a continuity in time, whereas in actuality each image is absolutely independent and its tense remains the present for as long as we perceive it. In film, as in life, the only reality is the present. “From cradle to grave, our lives are conducted in the present: we are never in the future or past” (Fraser 159).

Given that we do construct different aspects of time that are actually fabrications of the present, Robbe-Grillet arranges these images to suggest possible yet not fixed constructs of time. Once Boris is seen dreaming, the images belong within the non-temporality of the dream state. Yet the dream images do not necessarily flow from that moment forward. Previous images of the dogs and soldiers could be encompassed within the dream, just as subsequent images of Boris in the woods, being pursued and seeking escape, may indicate the future. Although we are shown Boris dreaming, the images are jump cuts. We do not know precisely when the dream begins, or if it is actually a dream. As a postmodern artist, Robbe-Grillet does not attempt “to stop all forward motion or to suppose that there is no ‘after’ and ‘before’; instead, that expansion makes available more starting points and more alternate routes” (Ermarth 212). Images prior to our seeing Boris dreaming could actually be images contained within the dream. “The ‘dreamed reality’ on the screen can move forward and backward because it is really an eternal and ubiquitous virtual present. … The dream mode is an endless Now” (Langer 415). Dreams thus resemble cosmic time that flows in two directions simultaneously; it is contained within the present yet extends beyond it. The dream is bound by the moment, and the moment is bound by the dream. This notion circles back to the paradoxes Borges expresses in “A New Refutation of Time.” “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire” (64). As Armes indicates, the dream sequence itself is circular: “There are shots of the forest at the beginning of the nightmare sequence … and a similar ‘answering’ shot identically placed at the end …” (96). In The Man Who Lies Robbe-Grillet devises a circular superstructure and within it other circular structures of segments. Within the dream segment, itself circular, Robbe-Grillet creates a sense of the non-temporality of the dream state within cosmic time.

Later, after Boris has lost control of the narrative, in one of the great ironies of the film, he rails, “Haven't you done enough to spoil the world for me—to waste my time?” In actuality, it is Boris who is wasting time, for the longer he can control and manipulate the narrative the longer he can remain in the present moment. He goes on to say—“I only want to live in peace, as I was before.” The reference pertains to that time of ghosts, eternity, that brings him respite but is exclusive of a being in time. To be alive is to anguish over human time. Ultimately, when he no longer controls the narrative, he is driven back to the forest, into the eternal realm of ghosts. Analogous to the basic principle of duality structuring The Man Who Lies, Robbe-Grillet creates circular structures that are based on Boris's dual desires regarding time—the desire to live in the anguish of the moment as opposed to the peace of eternity.

A secret pattern of time seems to connect Borges and Robbe-Grillet. Both artists deny the concept of succession and history and believe only in individual moments, yet they create patterns of circularity that in themselves are a kind of succession. Whereas Borges's Kilpatrick seeks as a sanctuary an immortality that transcends the present, Robbe-Grillet's Boris attempts to find meaning in an immortality of the moment. The circular patterns of Robbe-Grillet and Borges intersect. Where one begins, the other leaves off. Perhaps akin to the ending of both the story and film one author displaces another in time. Robbe-Grillet may claim, “My name is Borges.” Borges might counter with, “My name is Robbe-Grillet.”

Works Cited

Alifano, Roberto. Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges. Trans. Nicomedes Suárez Araúz, Willi Barnstone and Noemí Escandell. Massachusetts: Altamira Inter-Americana, 1984.

Armes, Roy. The Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1981.

Ayora, Jorge Rodrigo. A Study of Time in the Essays and Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Diss. Vanderbilt University. Nashville, 1969.

Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Sand. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977.

———. Ficciones. New York: Grove Press, 1962.

———. A Personal Anthology. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Princeton: U of Princeton P, 1992.

Fragola, Anthony N. and Roch C. Smith. The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on his Films. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Fraser, J. T. Time: The Familiar Stranger. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987.

Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.

Murphy, Carol J. “Robbe-Grillet, L'Homme qui ment: The Lie Belied.” French Review 57 (1983): 37-42.

Poulet, Georges. Studies in Human Time. Trans. Elliott Coleman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Ghosts in the Mirror. Trans. Jo Levy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1984.

———. For A New Novel. Trans. Richard Howard. Freeport, New York: 1970.

———. The Man Who Lies. 1968. Como Films.