Jealousy and In The Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF Page A

dilapidation— no matter how fine you slice the units of decay, he cannot see in them anything but their effects. The visual dispensation of the object is the only one that can include within it a forgotten time, perceived by its effects rather than by its duration, and hence deprived of its pathos.
    The whole endeavor of Robbe-Grillet has been to locate his object in a space provided in advance with these points of mutation, so that it seems merely out of joint rather than actually in the process of decay. The neon sign on the Gare Montparnasse would be a good object for Robbe-Grillet because its presented complexity of structure is entirely visual in effect, composed of a certain number of sites which have no other freedom but to annihilate themselves or change places. On the other hand, it is easy to conceive of things that would be bad objects for Robbe-Grillet: a lump of sugar dipped in water and gradually melting down (furnishing geographers their image of erosion) — here the continuity of decay would be inacceptable to Robbe-Grillet's intentions, since it restores a sense of the menace of time, the contagion of matter. On the contrary. Robbe-Grillet's objects never decay: they mystify or they disappear; time is never a corruption or even a catastrophe, but merely a change of place, a hideout for data.
    The point is most explicitly made in his "Three Reflected Visions," where Robbe-Grillet uses the phenomenon of mirror reflection to account for this kind of break in the temporal circuit: imagine the motionless changes of orientation produced by a mirror-image as being somehow decomposed and distributed throughout a certain period of time and you have the art of Alain Robbe-Grillet. But of course the virtual insertion of time into the vision of the object is an ambiguous matter: Robbe-Grillet's objects may have a temporal dimension, yet the concept of time in which they exist is scarcely a classical one — it is an unwonted sort of time, a time for nothing. If there is a sense in which Robbe-Grillet has restored time to his object, it would be nearer the truth to say that the kind of time he has restored is one in which an affirmative can be expressed only by a negative, a positive only by its contrary. Or better still, if more paradoxically, one might say that Robbe-Grillet has given his objects movement without that movement having taken place in time.
    I have no intention of detailing the plot of The Erasers (Robbe-Grillet's first novel) here, but I cannot resist pointing out that this book is the story of a circular sense of time which somehow cancels itself out after having led its men and its objects along an itinerary at the end of which they find themselves almost the same as when they started. Everything happens as if the whole story were reflected in a mirror which sets what is actually on the right on the apparent left, and conversely, so that the "plot" development is nothing more than a mirror-image spaced out over a period of twenty-four hours. For the knitting-together of the parts to become truly significant, of course, the point of departure must be unusual, even sensational. Hence the detective-story nature of this novel in which the "almost-the-same" qualities of the mirror-image consist in the corpse's change of identity.
    Thus even the plot of The Erasers enlarges this same ovoid (or overlooked) time that Robbe-Grillet has introduced among his objects. One might call it a mirror time — specular time. The development is even more flagrant, of course, in Le Chemin de Retour, in which sidereal time (in this case, the rhythm of the tide), by changing the shape of the land surrounding a tidal basin, represents the very gesture that causes the reflected object to succeed the direct one, welding them together where they meet. The tide modifies the hiker's field of vision as a mirror-image reverses the orientation of space — right becoming left, etc. Except that while the tide is rising, the hiker is