Notes to a Camera Man
WOLFF, GEOFFREY A.
Notes to a Camera Man LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS By Alain Robbe-Grillet Translated from French by Richard Howard Grove Press. 154 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by GEOFFREY A. WOLFF Book editor,the...
...one of the characters is a Communist...
...They are a series of moments, and only that...
...A lake is neither "placid" nor "angry," it is simply a body of water at a certain temperature, of a certain depth and in a certain shape...
...the man she plans to visit has been,-or will be, murdered by a dagger, or a sliver of glass, or a dog...
...The nouveau roman, whether practiced by Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, J.M.G...
...It contradicts many other descriptions...
...What is he doing...
...It is as complete as any other in the book because it neither depends upon any other information we have nor supports any...
...Robbe-Grillet, by dwelling here on flesh, whips, stockings, slit skirts, arched legs and tensed necks????ll the erotic paraphernalia of his glimpses of the White Slave and drug traffic in the Orient—sorts out the dreams and returns them to their fragments...
...They are fun to talk about...
...La Maison de Rendez-Vous is a collection of middle sequences, unexplained by a beginning and unresolved by an end...
...The answer to such innocence is the search for the object...
...no attempt by the novel's assortment of storytellers and spies (personae for the novelist) can invest them with a coherence they do not intrinsically possess...
...Robbe-Grillet would approve of this...
...But still, however accomplished a jeweller Robbe-Grillet may be in words...
...By ridding us of the habit of searching for connections between things and attitudes, between characters and characters, and between characters and ourselves, he was searching for a new novel...
...Then we look hard at them singly, then we arrange them, not to tell a story that we can translate into words but to lend visual coherence to a visually imagined encounter...
...Unless the I standard tour is a "must" for you, discover ? this unique tour before you go to Europe...
...its contour is a random series of dots, it closes no circles, it moves no line from point A to point B. Yet for all this, the book has its logic...
...This is one of many variants of the same scene: "Then she is in a courtyard where various discarded objects have been left: pieces of marble, iron beds, stuffed animals, old crates, mutilated statues, odd collections of pornographic Chinese magazines . . . [this episode, already past, no longer has its place here...
...And both are interested, above all, in the intellectual possibilities of the academic questions they raise...
...By insisting, tirelessly and often tiresomely, that their problems remain unsolved, the author tried to suggest a state of mind that would make possible a new way of reading...
...What Robbe-Grillet had in mind here was something more sophisticated than the elementary logic which moved Ruskin to say about the line in Kingston's Alton Rock...
...it shows the writer knows the importance of knowing where you are and of knowing the terms of the metaphor are not to be confused with the reality they attempt to suggest...
...The book begins: "Women's flesh has always played, no doubt, a great part in my dreams...
...But it is indifferent: its sum is a critical rather than creative act...
...Robbe-Grillet articulated his method recently in an interview with Pierre Demeron which appeared first in Lui and later in Evergreen Review...
...These novels are, like the present one, a collection of mysteries...
...There has been a murder, a suicide, an erotic masquerade, a police raid and an attempted poisoning...
...but the novel will yield nothing to the Freudian or Marxist critic...
...we see a blur and reconstruct a complete body...
...It is a fair observation: Both seem to find movement an alien quality...
...We berate the mountain and, hearing its reply, violate logic...
...LeClezio or Robbe-Grillet, takes as axiomatic the view that objects have a shape and integrity that is theirs and theirs alone...
...The novel Robbe-Grillet hopes to supplant is ignorant of such distinctions...
...It is rich, God knows, rich in the velvet and theatricality, the color and statuary that made the Resnais film of Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad such an exciting visual experience...
...Well, of course, in all our dreams...
...Our eyes leap to a ribbon of white thigh revealed above a stocking...
...we can as easily recall and misinterpret something that happened years ago as something that happened a few seconds ago...
...The images are obsessively erotic...
...We riffle through them quickly at first, discarding those that don't interest us...
...The novel is set (perhaps) in a Hong Kong brothel and the unidentified streets of its environs...
...Low cost yet covers all the usual ? plus places other tours miss...
...they arrest motion and put people, as well as objects, in prison...
...Reviewed by GEOFFREY A. WOLFF Book editor,the Washington "Post" to read Robbe-Grillet's latest novel is to experience the disorientation one suffers upon coming into a movie half over...
...It transpires during a single night...
...Ttiomas Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, pinned part of the dilemma: "The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost...
...But these events in themselves have nothing we can, or should, call "meaning...
...it assumes that when we cry out in a room and there is no answer it means a man has refused to answer, that communication has been broken...
...It is about itself...
...L ?Pasadena, California I...
...It is about what it is describing at any given moment...
...In one of his critical essays collected recently under the title For a New Novel, Robbe-Grillet put the matter this way: "While we may speak to the mountain, the mountain does not reply...
...The author was asked to comment on the role of the eye in eroticism...
...La Maison de Rendez-vous f brilliantly translated by Richard Howard) shifts and juggles the pieces of a particularly gaudy puzzle...
...the cruel, crawling foam") that the foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl...
...Her name is, or is not, Kim...
...The assumption, Robbe-Grillet says in For a New Novel, is "innocent": our cry may be answered by silence because the room is, simply, empty...
...In his earlier fictions????ast Year at Marienbad, Jealousy and In the Labyrinth????obbe-Grillet tried to pose alternatives to the traditional novel of social and pyschological meaning...
...It attempts to render memory as it really is, a dramatization of mutually exclusive and contrary events, cluttered by objects that are there in the memory for no other reason than that they happen to be there...
...There is no chronology in memory...
...He is obsessed with the shape of things, with the way they look...
...La Maison de Rendezvous is more than anything else an outline for a scenario or notes to a camera man...
...Rather let us imagine a stack of pornographic pictures...
...Perhaps that is enough...
...The camera dwells insistently on startling objects and suggestive tableaux...
...Who is the hero...
...So that what remains in our mind, what decorates our memories or sustains our hopes in the erotic realm is not a continuous scene but certain isolated gestures, aureoled within a movement: a girl in a summer dress, exposing the nape of her neck as she bends down to fasten her sandal . . ." Here is a description of a trip to Hong Kong by one of the servants of the madam of the brothel...
...EUROPE IAn unregimented trip stressing individual ? freedom...
...Who is he with...
...There is no priority in memory, as there is in the plot of a conventional novel: Memory does not subordinate one event to another for the convenience of external intelligibility...
...The reader asks himself quick, desperate questions: Where are we...
...The net effect seems cinematic...
...Whereas Ruskin was arguing against Pantheism as a metaphysical proposition, Robbe-Grillet is afraid that traditional metaphorical habits have made connections at the expense of the novel's perceptions as well as sacrificed objectivity to an outmoded vision of the sympathetic oneness of things...
...But it is not using consecutive frames to provide visual architecture for a story...
...He replied that "the eye immobilizes the persons being looked at as exactly as the photographer immobilizes his model, exactly as a man tends to immobilize a woman in the form of an imaginary object . . . moreover, I have the impression that the erotic (still) photograph has more of a future than the [cinema], because the [cinema] merely reproduces real activities, whereas the camera permits us to immobilize, within these complete activities, certain privileged, selected shots...
...Robbe-Grillet is often accused by critics of being a "cold" writer as Resnais is accused of being a "cold" director...
...The novel argues, in fact, against all systems of understanding or explanation imposed from without...
...A large part of its purpose is to set up a straw man, in the guise of an esthetic problem, to prove that our questions about who and what, about character and plot, are at best unanswerable and at worst irrelevant...
...The verbal photographs are exquisitely precise by themselves, each scene is a perfect and complete cameo...
...H EUROPE SUMMER TOURS I 255 Sequoia, Dept...
...The practitioners of the New Novel in France are referred to there collectively as the Ecole du Regard...
...Its plot is not the sum of its actions, for the events described are contradictory and revealed by rival narrators, sometimes in the guise of characters addressing us in the first person, sometimes by an omniscient observer...
...It is not the anecdote," he tells us, "that is lacking, it is only its character of certainty, its tranquillity, its innocence...
...To call it "placid" is not to speak of its quality but to imply the speaker's mood...
...The author becomes a photographer, he is described as a voyeur, he stays close to the technicians of the cinema...
...Now we see the young Eurasian girl backed into the corner of a luxurious room, near a lacquer chest whose lines are emphasized by bronze ornaments, all escape cut off by a man in a carefully trimmed gray goatee who is towering over her . . ." The passage stands alone...
...and to give substance to the metaphor, both Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima Mon Amour) and Robbe-Grillet (Last Year at Marien-bad) have collaborated on an equal basis with Alain Resnais, the master of visual jigsaw puzzles...
...He tried to show that effects often simply were, uninspired by causes...
...But much worse, to Robbe-Grillet, is our habit of forgetting that the violation of logic is metaphorical, and that its purpose is not to identify but to suggest...
Vol. 50 • January 1967 • No. 1
