CHARLIE: If he did that, he would violate the premise of the limited point of view of the narrator. McHale commends this novel for its use in extreme form of that classic tactic of modernist fiction.
BAKER: Unlike a modernist novel, however, Jealousy does not seem to want to reach resolution of the question. Is A... in bed with Franck? Finding the answer to that question would be the business of a typical story in the modernist mode. The narrator would busy himself not only with the objective gathering of evidence but also with the analysis of it. Robbe-Grillet's narrator (the word "narrator" is somewhat inaccurate) is no Sherlock Holmes. If he were, he would seize upon a small observed detail and render an hypothesis, which would "explain" all the other details. With the suspected reality revealed, the story would end with an actual or implied resolution of the inner conflict of the characters.
CHARLIE: The narrator, armed with the truth, would shoot Franck and pin the incriminating note written by A... on blue paper to his bleeding chest.
ABLE: Or he would shoot A... and Franck would arrive and shoot the narrator and then drive away in his car, which would break down in the jungle, leaving him to waste away in pain.
BAKER: Yes, anything like that. But this narrator is not interested in putting two and two together. And so he does not give us the familiar kind of story. Even after nearly four decades, the strangeness of the fiction clings, even after we have developed a familiarity with the strategies of what was the "new novel."
ABLE: Of course we realize that the narrator is not "objective." Yes, he does not comment. He does not speculate on the innerness of anything or anyone. He does not try to find the answer to the puzzle of what is the case.
CHARLIE: That is to say, he is not interested in the grounds of knowledge. He is not "epistemological" in his basic orientation.
ABLE: But he is objective only about what he sees. He IS the camera lens and is limited to what it aims at. But SELECTION is the essence of camera work. We have here a highly selective objectivity. Why do we learn so much about the paint on the balustrade and the arrangement of the banana trees and so little about, say, the pores and pimples on the face of the house boy? The narrator had an opportunity to point himself at the face of the boy. He did not take it.
BAKER: Are we to believe, then, that what the narrator selects to look at adds up to something? Is this simply a special kind of detective story in the modernist mode?
CHARLIE: Wrong. Robbe-Grillet abandons the old business of correspondences. He does not want us to worry about the inner psychological structure of the camera-narrator. That would just be another detective story. It would be asking: based on what the narrator reports, can we put together the whole puzzle of his psychological state? That is not a legitimate goal in reading this story. It would not be interesting to Robbe-Grillet or to his attentive reader.
ABLE: We can say, though, that Robbe-Grillet's approach here to a situation emerged at a moment of twentieth-century experience. What does it say about an epoch that finds Jealousy of value as a creative expression?
BAKER: At its first appearance in France in 1957, it was laughed at by the critics.
CHARLIE: Most novelties evoke hostile reaction from the unadventurous. The critical world soon got over that initial reaction.
ABLE: We can argue that Robbe-Grillet was writing within a framework of lived experience in the twentieth century. Technically, his narrator is possible to be imagined because of the evolution of technology, in this case the movie camera. Emotionally, the camera strategy permits Robbe-Grillet to show how to cope. We can envision him huddled in our little group around the fire in the darkness. He is trying to tell us how to cope with our fears in this new time. A good old story with a good old happy ending won't do any more. Nor would a good old story with a good old tragic ending--they add up to the same old sense of comfort, which by 1957 would not work.
BAKER: This speaks to the uses of creative expression in a culture that was already finding modernism to be insufficient--or worse. Remember childhood. We were desperately frightened by the unknown. When we were alone in our attic room, and our parents were out somewhere, we remember curling ourselves up and looking at the flowers of the wallpaper. Nothing else. It got us through the terrifying time until the car pulled in and our parents returned.
ABLE: People acquired the postmodern sensibility because of the experiences they had in our century. Robbe-Grillet, in that sense, is in service to their need for believing life can go on in the teeth of the century's legacy.
CHARLIE: Wars on a global scale for the first time. The discovery that there is no exit any more on the earth. The knowledge that a human being could destroy the earth and all thereon. The gradual disappearance of an unmediated nature to which people could escape, if only imaginatively. Even an imagined nature could not survive the presentness of the technological miracle.
ABLE: Jealousy thus allows us to see how one can curl himself up and survive on limited sensory input. This is not reflective. It is ontologically delimiting. "Here I stand," Martin Luther said. In a radically contradictory way, the narrator in Jealousy makes the same declaration.
BAKER: Anne Minor writes about this in an introductory essay. She says that the narrator turns to the precise descriptions of paint and banana plantings and the like for a reason: he is trying "to convince himself of his own objectivity." He wants to assure himself that he is not mad: "I only say what I see, I only see what exists." How much like us in our attic room, curled up and limiting our intake in order to get through.
ABLE: Robbe-Grillet's approach is possible because of the change in sensibility provoked by World War I. That is when the rational world collapsed, and people had to alter their stance in order to deal with it. The superficial sang-froid of World War II merely reinforces the shift necessitated by the madness that was domesticated in the trenches and brought back home.
CHARLIE: Pat Barker's novels about World War I bring that back to us, now that the old soldiers all have gone. The Ghost Road, Regeneration, The Eye in the Door. Rosemary Dinnage said it well in a review of Barker's books in NY Review of Books (15 Feb 96): "Perhaps Barker wants to show that the twentieth century, having invented war in its ultimately horrible form, also produced a new way of accepting mental suffering." Squeeze down to the things at hand. Don't even think about what it all means.
BAKER: We can see how such a strategy would evoke what we consider postmodern. It accentuates the surface. It privileges space and place. It acknowledges that the meaning of it all will elude you no matter how hard you try. It is better not to try. Better to narrow the scope. Better not to burrow or to look for evidence of burrowing.
ABLE: Rooting the new novel in soil as deep as World War I makes sense. The postmodern sensibility emerged from the century's experience and needs. It did not arise as a catcall at the establishment. If it is to be deplored, it needs to be deplored on terms of need, not on terms of cultural warfare.
CHARLIE: Jealousy therefore represents a link with the past and a pointer at things still to come.
ABLE: We can conclude that the narrative is not maddening, then; it shows us something about the manner of response required in postmodernity.
CHARLIE: There was more to come.