Dans le labyrinthe orginally published in 1959, same publisher.
Introductory essays:
Bruce Morrissette, Surfaces and Structures in Robbe-Grillet's Novels
Roland Barthes, Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Anne Minor, A Note on Jealousy
A dying soldier, escaping from a disastrous military defeat, is carrying a box on a street in the city. He is trying to deliver the box, which contains the effects of a soldier-friend who has died, to a family member on a street corner. But he cannot locate the street corner.
Searching for the location in a street grid that comes to resemble a labyrinth, he is shot by the occupying troops who patrol the street on motorcycle. A well-dressed doctor and a woman and boy give him refuge in an apartment. The doctor gives him several shots, probably of morphine, to ease his pain as he dies.
This "story" is rendered in a series of scenes of the soldier's actions on the street, in the apartment, in a barracks for wounded soldiers, and in a cafe, which is the same as the cafe in a painting on the apartment wall, "The Defeat of Reichenfels."
"She has now picked up her knitting again; she continues to look at him, her hands resting on her knees. She resembles a statue. Her regular face with its sharp features recalls that of the woman who served him some wine one day, some other time, long ago. He makes an effort to say:
"I'm thirsty.
"His lips have probably not even moved, for she neither stands up, nor answers, nor makes the slightest gesture. Moreover, her pale eyes had pershaps not even glanced at him, but at the other drinkers sitting farther away at other tables, toward the back of the room, where her gaze has now passed the soldier and his two companions, moving over the other tables along the wall where the small white bulletins are tacked whose fine-printed text still attracts a knot of readers...." (p. 256)
This presents one of the shifts of "zone" or place characteristic of the novel. The cafe scene is that found in the picture of the "Defeat of Reichenfels." The coming into "life" of that scene is referred to my McHale as trompe-l'oeil.
RELATIONSHIP TO DEPTH (TIME), OBJECTIVE REALITY, METANARRATIVE
In one of the introductory essays of this volume, Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Roland Barthes tells us about the author's strategy in creating objective rather than realistic text. In doing so, he holds R-G's fiction up as an example of the postmodern theories surrounding text, metanarrative, and the nature of subject and object. In realistic, modernist fiction, the author chooses details in order to represent an objective world. R-G, by contrast, according to Barthes, "intends the assassination of the object, at least as literature has traditionally represented it." (p. 16)
R-G rigorously limits his point of view to that of sight, the surface of perspectival experience. (Note: the perspectival reference here connects to the phenomenological requirements of Nietzsche's view as we learn about it from Heidegger.) Modernists do that too. But they intend that the elements within sight refer to the deeper meaning of things which is not evident to sight. R-G eliminates depth. Barthes says that his described object "never conceals a secret, vulnerable heart beneath its shell." (p. 13) Thus, we find that R-G's fiction illustrates the characteristic loss of depth relationships, especially those rooted in ordered time. This characteristic is especially well examined by Fredric Jameson.
The result of R-G's approach is to do away with all the associational attributes of an object, those attributes required in a modernist world that coheres.
Barthes concludes his essay with an emphasis on the basic purpose of R-G's fiction: "to establish the novel on the surface [in a space, that is]: once you can set its inner nature, its 'interiority,' between parentheses, then objects in space, and the circulation of men among them, are promoted to the rank of subjects."
So the novel becomes "man's direct experience of what surrounds him without his being able to shield himself with a psychology, a metaphysic, or a psychoanalytic method in his combat with the objective world he discovers." (p. 25) That is, it obviates the place of a metanarrative in the processing of experience.