Objective, (adj.). Optics. Of a lens, etc., nearest the object. - Webster's New International Dictionary

On the pediment of the Gare Montparnasse is a huge neon sign: BONS-KILOMÈTRES, several letters of which are regularly out of commission. It would be a good object for Robbe-Grillet, an object after his own heart this structure" whose malfunctions can mysteriously change places with each other from one day to the next. "Objects of this kind—extremely complicated, somewhat un-stable—are numerous in Robbe-Grillet's work. They are gen­erally objects taken from the urban environment (sidewalk directories, professional-service signs, post-office notice boards, electric gates, bridge superstructures) or from ordinary sur­roundings flight switches, reading glasses, percolators, dress­maker's dummies, packaged sandwiches). "Natural" objects are rare (trees in the third "Reflected Vision," a bay in The Voyeur), immediately alienated from man and nature, more­over, to become the mainstay of an "optical" reflection.

All these objects are described with an application apparently disproportionate to their, if not insignificant, at least purely functional character.  In Robbe-Grillet, description is always anthological: it apprehends the object as in a mirror and constitutes it before us as a spectacle; that is, the object is entitled to take up our time regardless of the appeals which the dialectic of the narrative may make to it. The indiscreet object remains there; it has the same freedom of exposition as one of Balzac's portraits, though not the same psychological necessity. Another characteristic of this description: it is never allusive, never distills from the sum of lines and substances a certain attribute meant to signify economically the entire nature of the object (Racine: "Dans l'Orient désert, quel devint mon en­nui," or Hugo: "Londres, une rumeur sous une fumée"). Robbe-Grillet's writing has no alibi, no density and no depth: it remains on the surface of the object and inspects it inv. partially, without favoring any particular quality: it is the exact opposite of poetic writing. Here the word does not explode, nor explore; its function is not to confront the object in order to pluck out of the heart of its substance an ambiguous, sum­marizing name: language here is not the rape of an abyss, but the rapture of a surface; it is meant to "paint" the object, in other words to caress it to deposit little by little in the circuit of its space an entire chain of gradual names, none of which will exhaust it.

Yet Robbe-Grillet's scrupulosity of description has nothing in common with the artisanal application of the naturalistic novelist. Traditional realism accumulates qualities as a function of an implicit judgment: its objects have shapes, but also odors, tactile properties, memories, analogies, in short they swarm with significations; they have a thousand modes of being per­ceived, and never with impunity, since they involve a human movement of disgust or appetite. Instead of this sensorial syncretism, at once anarchic and oriented, Robbe-Grillet im­poses a unique order of apprehension: the sense of sight. The object is no longer a center of correspondences, a welter of sensations and symbols: it is merely an optical resistance.

This promotion of the visual involves singular consequences: primarily this, that Robbe-Grillet’s object is not composed in depth; it does not protect a heart beneath its surface (and the literary man's traditional role has hitherto been to discern, beneath the surface, the secret of objects); no, here the object does not exist beyond its phenomenon; it is not double, al­legorical; we cannot even say that it is opaque, which would be to recover a dualistic nature. The minuteness with which Robbe-Grillet describes the object has nothing tendentious about it; it completely establishes the object, so that once its appearance is described, it is exhausted; if the author leaves it, he does so not out of submission to a rhetorical propriety, but because the object has an other resistance than that of its surfaces and, once these are "covered," language must with-draw from an encounter which could only be alien to the object, given over to poetry or eloquence. Robbe-Grillet's silence about the romantic heart of things is not an allusive or sacral silence, it is a silence which irremediably establishes the object's limit, not its aura: this slice of tomato in an automat sandwich, described according to Robbe-Grillet's method, con­stitutes an object without heredity, without associations and without references, a stubborn object rigorously enclosed within the order of its particles, suggestive of nothing but itself, and not involving its reader in a functional or substantial else­where. "The human condition." Heidegger has said, "is to be there." Robbe-Grillet himself quotes this remark apropos of Waiting for Godot, and it applies to his own objects as well. The author's entire art is to give the object a Dasein, a "beings there” and to strip it of "being-something."

Hence Robbe-Grillet's object has neither function nor substance. Or more precisely, both are absorbed by the object's optical nature. With regard to function, here is an example: So-and-so's dinner was ready—some ham. Such would be at least the adequate sign of the alimentary function. But Robbe-Grillet says: "On the kitchen table, there are three slices of ham laid on a white plate." Here function is cunningly usurped by the very existence of the object: thinness, position, color establish not so much an aliment as a complex space; and if the object is here the function of something, it is not the function of its natural destination (to be eaten) but of a visual itinerary, that of the murderer whose course is a passage from object to object, from surface to surface. As a matter of fact, the object contains a power of mystification; its technological nature, so to speak, is always immediately apparent, the sandwiches are food, the erasers instruments of deletion, the bridges structures for crossing; the object is never unfamil­iar, it belongs, by its obvious function, to an urban or everyday setting. But the description persists beyond—just when we expect it to stop, having fulfilled the object's instrumentality, it holds like an inopportune pedal point and transforms the tool into space: its function was only illusory, it is its optical circuit which is real: its humanity begins where its use leaves off.

Substance suffers the same singular distortion. We must re­call here that the "coenesthesia" of matter is at the heart of all romantic sensibility (in the broad sense of the word romantic: Jean-Pierre Richard has demonstrated this apropos of Flaubert and other nineteenth-century writers in his Littérature et sensa­tion). For the romantic writer, we may establish a thematics of substance precisely to the degree that the object is not opti­cal but tactile, thus involving his reader in a visceral experience of matter (appetite or nausea). In Robbe-Grillet, on the con­trary, the promotion of the visual, the sacrifice of all the ob­ject's attributes to its "superficial" existence (we must note in passing the discredit traditionally attached to this mode of vision) suppresses any humoral relation to the object. Sight produces existential movements only insofar as It Can" be re­duced to acts of palpation, manducation, or concealment. Now Robbe-Grillet never permits an encroachment upon the optical by the visceral, he pitilessly severs the visual from its extensions.

In Robbe-Grillet's work, I find only one metaphor, that is, a single adjective of substance, applied moreover to the one psychoanalytic object of his collection: the softness of erasers ("I'd like a very soft eraser"). Except for this tactile qualifica­tion, designated by the mysterious gratuitousness of the object, which gives the book its title as a scandal or a riddle, there is no thematics in Robbe-Grillet, for optical apprehension, which prevails everywhere else, cannot establish either correspond­ences or reductions, only symmetries.

By this tyrannical recourse to sight, Robbe-Grillet doubtless intends to assassinate the classical object. The task is an ar­duous one, for, without realizing it, our intimacy with the world, in literature, is of an organic and not a visual order. The first step of this well-planned murder is to isolate objects, to sever them from their function and from our biology. Robbe-Grillet leaves them only superficial links to situation and space; he removes any possibility of metaphor, cuts them off from that network of analogical forms or states which has al­ways passed for the poet's privileged terrain (and we know how much the myth of poetic "power" has contaminated every order of literary creation).

But what is harder to kill in the classical object is the temptation of the singular and total adjective (the gestaltist adjective, one might say), which manages to bind all the object's metaphysical links (Dans l’Orient désert . . .). What Robbe-Grillet seeks to destroy is therefore the adjective: quali­fication is never, in his writing, anything but spatial, situational, in no case analogical. If we were to transpose this op position to painting (with all the reservations such comparisons require), we might give, as an example of the classical object, some Dutch still life, in which the minuteness of the details is completely subjugated by a dominant quality which trans­forms all the substances of vision into a single sensation of a visceral order: sheen, for example, is the manifest goal of all those compositions of oysters, glasses, wine, and metal, "so nnmerous -in Pnroh nrj Such painting seeks to endow the ob­ject with an adjectival skin: it is this half-visual, half-sub­stantial glaze which we ingest by means of a kind of sixth sense, coenesthetic and no longer superficial. It is as if the painter managed to name the object with a warm, dizzying name which catches us up, draws us into its continuity, and implicates us in the homogeneous texture of an ideal substance, consisting of the superlative qualities of all possible substance. This is also the secret of the splendid Baudelairean rhetoric, in which each name, summoned from the most discrepant orders, deposits its tribute of ideal sensations in an ecumenical and somehow radiant perception of matter:

Mais les bijoux perdus de l'antique Palmyre, Les me'taux inconnus, les perles de la mer . . .

Robbe-Grillet's description has its analogy, on the other hand, to modern painting (in the broad sense of the word modern), insofar as modern painting has abandoned the sub­stantial qualification of space to propose instead a simultaneous reading of figurative planes, and to restore to the object its "essential core." Robbe-Grillet destroys the object's substantial dominance because it hampers his capital intention, which is to insert the object into a dialectics of space. Nor perhaps is this space Euclidean: the care with which the object is located by a kind of proliferation of planes, with which a singularly fragile point of resistance is found in the elasticity of our sight, has nothing to do with the classical concern for naming the direc­tions of the picture.

It must be recalled that in classical description, the picture or scene is always a spectacle, a motionless site, frozen by eternity: the spectator (or the reader) has given the painter power of attorney to circulate around the object, to explore by a shifting gaze its shadows and what Poussin called its "pros­pect," to restore to it the simultaneity of all possible approaches. Whence the imaginary supremacy of the spectator's "situa­tions" (expressed by the nominalism of the orientations: "on the right ... on the left ... in the foreground ... in the background . . ."). Modern description, on the contrary, at least that of painting, arrests the viewer and releases the spectacle, adjusts it in several tenses to his vision; as we have already remarked, modern canvases leave the wall, they come to the spectator, oppress him with an aggressive space: the paint­ing is no longer a "prospect," it is a "project." This is precisely the effect of Robbe-Grillet's descriptions: they set themselves jn motion spatially, the object is released without thereby los­ing track ot its initial positions, it assumes dimension without ceasing to be a plane. We recognize here the same revolution which the cinema has worked upon our visual reflexes.

In The Erasers, Robbe-Grillet has had the coquetry to in­clude a scene in which man's relations with the new space are described in an exemplary fashion. Bona is sitting in the center of an empty, bare room, and he describes the spatial field be­fore his eyes: that field (it includes the windowpane behind which appears a horizon of roofs) moves in front of the motionless man, space is "de-Euclidized" then and there. Robbe-Grillet has here reproduced the experimental conditions of cinematographic vision: the cubical room is the theater, its bareness is the darkness necessary for the emergence of the motionless vision, and the windowpane is the screen, flat and yet open to all the dimensions of movement, even to that of time.

Of course all this is not, for the most part, given so directly. Robbe-Grillet's descriptive machinery is in part a mystifying machinery. Witness his apparent application in arranging the elements of the scene according to a classical orientation of the fictive spectator. Like any traditional writer, he throws in a great many of those "on the right's" and "on the left's" whose motor role in classical composition we have just considered. And the fact is that these purely adverbial terms describe nothing: linguistically they are of a gestural order and have no more density than a cybernetic message. This has been, per­haps, the great illusion of classical rhetoric, to believe that the verbal orientation of a scene can have any power of suggestion or representation. In literary terms, which means outside of an operative order, these notions are interchangeable, hence strictly useless: they had no other reason than to justify the spectator's ideal mobility.

If Robbe-Grillet uses them, with the deliberation of a good artisan, it is in order to parody classical space, to disperse the concretion of substance, to dissolve it under the pressure of an overconstructed space. Robbe-Grillet's many specifications, his

obsession with topopraphv. his entire demonstrative machinery has the effect of destroying the object's unity by hypersituating it, so that initially substance is drowned under an accumulation or lines and orientations, and subsequently the abuse of planes, though endowed with classical denominations, explodes tradi­tional space and substitutes for it a new space, furnished as we shall see with a temporal depth.

In short, Robbe-Grillet's descriptive operations can be sum­marized as follows: to destroy Baudelaire by a parodic recourse to Lamartine, and thereby, it goes without saying, to destroy Lamartine. (This comparison is not gratuitous, if we grant that our literary "sensibility" is entirely adjusted, by ancestral reflexes, to a "Lamartinean" vision of space.) Robbe-Grillet's patient analyses, scrupulous to the point of seeming a pastiche of Balzac or Flaubert, by their overprecision ceaselessly cor­rode the object, attack that adjectival film which classical art deposits on a picture, a scene, in order to induce in its specta­tor or reader the euphoria of a reconstituted unity. The classi­cal object inevitably secretes its adjective (the Dutch sheen, the Racinean désert, the Baudelairean superlative substance): Robbe-Grillet opposes this inevitability, his analysis is an anti­coagulant operation: at all costs, the object's carapace must be destroyed, the object must be kept open, available to its new dimension, time.

In order to grasp the object's temporal nature in Robbe-Grillet, we must observe the mutations he makes it undergo, and here again contrast the revolutionary nature of his attempt with the norms of classical description. The latter, certainly, has managed to submit its objects to forces of decay. But pre­cisely: it is as if the object, long since constituted in its space or its substance, thereafter encountered a necessity descended from the empyrean; classical time has no other figure than that of a destroyer of perfection (Chronos and his scythe). In Balzac, in Flaubert, in Baudelaire, even in Proust (but in an inverted mode), the object is the vehicle of a melodrama; it. decays, vanishes, or recovers a final glory, participates in short in a veritable eschatology of matter.  One might say that the classical object is never anything but the archetype of its own ruin, which means setting against the object's spatial essence a subsequent (hence external) time functioning as a destiny and not as an internal dimension.

Classical time never encounters the object except as its catastrophe or deliquescence. Robbe-Grillet gives his objects an entirely different type of mutability. It is a mutability whose process is invisible: an object, first described at a moment of novelistic continuity, reappears later on, endowed with a scarcely perceptible difference..This difference is of a spatial, situational order (for instance, what was on the right is now on the left), lime dislocates space and constitutes the object as a series of slices which almost completely overlap each other: in that spatial "almost" lies the object's temporal dimension. This is a type of variation which we find in a cruder version in the movement of magic-lantern slides, or of animated comic strips.

Now we can understand the profound reason why Robbe-Grillet has always reinstated the object in a purely optical fashion: sight is the only sense in which the continuous is an addition of tiny but integral fields: space can tolerate only completed variations: man never participates visually in the internal process of decay: however parceled out it may be, he sees only its effects. The object's optical institution is therefore the only kind which can comprehend a forgotten time in the object, grasped by its effect, not by its duration—that is, stripped of its pathos.

Robbe-Grillet's entire endeavor is therefore to invent for the object a space endowed in advance with its points of mutation, so that the object is dislocated rather than decayed.  To return to my initial example, the neon sign on the Gare Montparnasse would be a good object for Robbe-Grillet insofar as the proposed complex is here of a purely optical order, consist­ing of a certain number of emplacements which have no free­dom except to abolish themselves or to change places with each other. We may, on the other hand, readily imagine ob­jects antipathetic to Robbe-Grillet's method: for example" alump of sugar dipped in water and gradually dissolving (fur­nishing geographers their image of karst erosion): here the very continuity of decay would be intolerable to Robbe-Grillet's intention, since it reinstates a comminatory time and a con­tagious  matter. On the contrary, Robbe-Grillet's objects never decay, they mystify or disappear: their time is never degradation or cataclysm: it only change of place or concealment of elements..

As Robbe-Grillet has indicated in his "Reflected Visions,” it is the accidents of reflexiveness which best account for this kind of break: it is enough to imagine that the motionless changes of orientation produced by mirror reflection are de­composed and dispersed throughout duration, in order to ob­tain the art of Robbe-Grillet itself. But of course the potential insertion of time into the vision of the object is ambiguous: Robbe-Grille’s objects have a temporal dimension, but it is not classical time they possess: it is an unfamiliar time, a time for nothing. One might say that Robbe-Grillet has restored time to the object; but it would be much better to say that he has restored a litotic time: or, more paradoxically but still more accurately: movement minus time.

I have no intention of attempting a plot analysis of The Erasers here; yet we must recall that this book is the story of a circular time which in a sense annihilates itself after having involved men and objects in an itinerary at whose end they are left almost the same as at the start. It is precisely as if the whole story were reflected in a mirmr which puts on the left what is on the right and conversely, so that the "plot's" muta-tion is nothing more than a mirror reflection disposed over a \ twenty-four hour interval. Of course, for the return to be significant, the point of departure must be singular. Hence a kind of murder-mystery plot, in which the minor vision's almost-the-same is a corpse's change of identity.

Evidently, the very plot of The Erasers merely writes large that same elliptical (or forgotten) time which Robbe-Grillet has introduced into his objects. We might call it mirror time. The demonstration is even more flagrant in The Voyeur, in which sidereal time, that of the tide, by modifying the land around a bay, represents the very gesture which causes the direct object to be succeeded by its reflected vision and joins the one to the other. The tide modifies the walker's visual field exactly as reflection reverses the orientation of a space. Except that while the tide is rising, the walker is on the island, absent from the actual duration of the mutation, and time is put between parentheses.  This intermittent retreat is in fact the central act of Robbe-Grillet's experiments: to withdraw man from the .fabrication or the becoming of objects, and to alienate finally the world from its surface.

Robbe-Grillet's endeavor is decisive insofar as it attacks the raw material of literature which still enjoyed a complete classi­cal privilege: the object. Not that contemporary writers have not already dealt with it, and very effectively—one thinks of Cayrol and Ponge. But Robbe-Grille’s method has something more experimental about it; it aspires to an exhaustive interro­gation of the object, from which any lyrical diversion is excluded. In order to encounter an analogous plenitude of treat­ment, we must turn to modern painting, must observe there the torment of a rational destruction of the classical object. Robbe-Grillet's importance is that he has attacked the last bastion of our traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space. His endeavor is equal in importance to that of surrealism against rationality, or of the avant-garde theater (Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov) against the bourgeois stage.

Only, his solution borrows nothing from these corresponding combats: his destruction of classical space is neither oneiric nor irrational; it is based instead on the idea of a new structure of matter and movement: its analogical basis is neither the Freud­ian nor the Newtonian universe; we must rather think of a mental complex derived from contemporary arts and sciences such as the new physics and the cinema. This can be only roughly indicated, for here as elsewhere what we lack is a his­tory of forms.

And since we also lack an esthetic of the novel (that is, a history of its institution by the writer), we can only roughly indicate Robbe-Grillet's place in the novel's development. Here too we must recall the traditional background against which Robbe-Grillet's endeavor occurs: the novel long established as the experience of a depth: a social depth with Balzac and Zola, a “psychological" depth with Flaubert, a memorial depth with Proust—the novel has always determined its terrain as interior to man or society; and there has always been, in the novelist, a corresponding mission to excavate, to mine out. This endoscopic function, sustained by the concomitant myth of a human essence, has always been so natural to the novel that we are tempted to define its exercise (creation or consumption) as a delectation of the abyss.

Robbe-Grillet's endeavor (and that of some of his con-temporaries: Cayrol and Pinget, for instance, though in alto­gether different modes) seeks to establish the novel on the surface: inferiority is put in parentheses; objects, spaces, and man's circulation among them are promoted to the rank of sub­jects. The novel becomes a direct experience of man's surroundings, without this man's being able to fall back on a psychology, a metaphysic, or a psychoanalysis in order to approach the objective milieu he discovers. The novel, here, is no longer of a chthonic, infernal order, it is terrestrial: it teaches us to look at the world no longer with the eyes of a confessor, a physician, or of God—all significant hypostases of the classical novelist—but with the eyes of a man walking in his city with no other horizon but the spectacle before him, "no other power than that of his own eyes.

1  "In the empty East, how great my suffering grew."
2  “London, a murmur beneath a fog.”
3  "But the lost jewels of ancient Palmyra, unknown metals, pearls of the sea..."