The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet

First published:Les Gommes, 1953 (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Detective

Time of work: Probably after World War II

Locale: An unnamed northern French city

Principal Characters:

• Wallas, a detective
• Laurent, a police commissioner
• Daniel Dupont, the victim
• Evelyne Dupont, his ex-wife
• Garinati, an assassin
• Dr. Juard, a friend of Dupont

The Novel

The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first published novel, is about a detective, named Wallas, who is sent from the capital to a northern city to investigate the latest in a series of political assassinations. The most recent victim, Daniel Dupont, was, however, only slightly wounded in the attempt. His friend, Dr. Juard, hides the fact that Dupont is still alive and also withholds his “body” from the police in order to protect him from a possible second assassination attempt.

Wallas is on his first solo mission for a governmental intelligence agency and is to take charge of the investigation. Parallel to Wallas’ search for a murderer is his attempt to procure a certain type of eraser that he once saw, hence the title of the book. Although the reader does not see the hero of the novel, Wallas, in the first part of the prologue, it is eventually revealed that Wallas arrived late the night before and has taken a room in a cafe-hotel and that the owner is to call him at an early hour.

As the prologue begins, the cafe owner is preparing for the day’s business and recalling bits and pieces of conversations from both the distant and recent past. The passages are written exactly in the way that one would think to oneself about such experiences, leading to sudden shifts of time or of locale and persons and giving the reader no sense of chronology or any explanation for the sudden changes. This method of writing, the suppression of linear time and space, seems to owe much to Marcel Proust; it is one of the hallmarks of the New Novel.

Included in the owner’s thoughts is the fact that Dupont is not dead. Since Dupont’s phone was out of order, his housekeeper had called the police from the cafe, telling them that Dupont was only slightly wounded in the arm. At the same time, Robbe-Grillet seems to warn the reader that there will be the classic red herrings of the detective novel in this book, since the cafe owner has seen a newspaper relating Dupont’s death and thinks to himself that they can print anything they want but that they will never make him believe stories deliberately made up to fool people.

In the same manner, the reader is introduced to the murderer, Garinati, and his chief, Bona, who is giving his subordinate instructions on how to proceed with entering the house and killing Dupont. The reader makes a tour, through Garinati’s eyes, of Dupont’s house and witnesses the assassination attempt. The reader is also present at a meeting of Dupont and his friends while they discuss how to save him from the killers. Everything is presented to the reader in a series of flashbacks, without preamble or explanation. Finally, the prologue concludes with three words: “Wallas, Special Agent.”

Wallas has risen early and walks through this unknown city of labyrinthine streets looking for the central police station. He asks directions of various people and, not wishing to make his identity known, lies to them, saying that he wants to go to the post office. This method leads to various complications, and he then gives, to himself, true answers as well as other false ones that lead to more complications.

Wallas finally meets with Commissioner Laurent, and they discuss the case. Laurent is rather annoyed at Wallas’ being put in charge of the investigation but does his best to conceal it. Laurent is also bothered by the fact that he does not have a body to examine. The commissioner is not sure if Dupont was murdered, killed himself, or died accidentally.

Wallas goes to Dupont’s house and interviews the old housekeeper. He also examines the study where Dupont was shot. Wallas takes to the streets again, and, quite by accident, enters the stationery store of Evelyne Dupont while looking for the elusive eraser. Wallas realizes that she must be the ex-wife when he sees a picture of Dupont’s house. He interrogates her, and she assures Wallas that Dupont could not possibly have committed suicide. Meanwhile, Laurent has also been conducting his part of the investigation, weighing all the possibilities, interviewing witnesses, imagining what might have happened.

Wallas eventually returns to Dupont’s house to reexamine the office where the attempt on Dupont’s life occurred. He is in the study when Dupont arrives on the scene, looking for important papers that he needs to take with him in his temporary flight. At the same time, Laurent is in his office, scoffing at the report of a young and overzealous subordinate who, believing people who were obviously playing a joke on him, has cooked up a theory that Dupont had an illegitimate son about twenty years ago. It is then that Laurent concludes that if he cannot find a body, it is because Dupont is still alive. He calls Dupont’s house to tell Wallas, but the call is too late: Wallas has just killed Dupont.

The Characters

It is difficult, if not impossible, to talk about the characters in a normal sense, that is in the sense that Honore de Balzac or Gustave Flaubert created characters. The central characters, Wallas, Laurent, and Garinati, have no first name and very little or no background. For example, all that the reader is told about their physical makeup is that Laurent is bald and that Garinati is small and has the face of a sad spider. The physical description of Wallas is limited to the fact that he is big and shaved his mustache for this assignment, and that his mentor and hero, Inspector Fabius, almost rejected him because his forehead measured only forty-nine square centimeters instead of the required fifty. Beyond that, the reader is told only that Wallas has a mother and that he had come to this particular city, as a child, to see his father, but that he did not meet him. It is also known that his previous assignment was keeping an eye on some Theosophical groups. There is strong evidence to suggest that these characters are to be seen not as individuals but as objects to be described as part of the art of writing. Such an indication comes in the interview with Evelyne Dupont, when she tells Wallas that Dupont was never alive, and when Robbe-Grillet adds, during Wallas’ interrogation of Dupont’s housekeeper, that Dupont’s death is now an abstract event being discussed by mannequins.

Critical Context

In his collection of essays Pour un nouveau roman (1963; For a New Novel, 1965), Robbe-Grillet states that the hero of the New Novel is not to be seen as a person in the traditional sense but as the “simple subject of the action expressed by the verb.” Robbe-Grillet also derides the notion that the novel must contain psychological truths. According to him, the most ridiculous thing that critics say is that author so-and-so has something to say and says it well. Could one not maintain, asks Robbe-Grillet rhetorically, that the true artist has nothing to say, only a way of saying it? Robbe-Grillet also says that the true work of art does not contain anything, message or other, as a box might contain something foreign to itself. To the contrary, he states that writing is an art and must be sufficient unto itself and that it is time to stop fearing art for art’s sake. In this vein, if there is a scene in The Erasers that is admired both by Robbe-Grillet’s supporters and by his detractors, it is the one describing a slice of tomato. The description of the tomato has the absolute precision of an anatomical plate and has nothing to do in any way with the novel itself. Its very gratuitousness would seem to bear witness to Robbe-Grillet’s seriousness about his theories on the art and goals of writing. (It should be mentioned that the passage is much more impressive in French than it is in English.) Critics dismiss Robbe-Grillet’s critical writings as unimportant or as totally exaggerated. Regarding The Erasers, however, a case can be made for such an interpretation, that is, of art for art’s sake.

First, Robbe-Grillet does not identify Wallas as being or not being the son of Dupont, and such an omission is contrary to the normal practice in a detective novel, in which there is a definite answer to every given problem. Second, Wallas is still young (encore jeune), that is, in his forties, and therefore much too old to be that son, since Dupont was fifty-two when he died. There are also the warnings about reading too much into the “evidence,” and also Wallas’ interview with a Mme Bax who, when he suggests what she might have seen or heard, tells him not to add too much detail for fear that he will make her think she “saw the whole thing,” when she saw only a man who stopped in front of Dupont’s gate.

The most important argument against an Oedipal interpretation, however, is the fact that most elements of any importance in The Erasers, other than the erasers themselves, and certainly including all the Oedipal clues, (and indeed, the very name Wallas), seem to have been taken bodily from A Gun for Sale: An Entertainment (1936; published in the United States as This Gun for Hire: An Entertainment) by Graham Greene, a book for which there is no possibility of giving an Oedipal interpretation. (Note also that, again besides the eraser, the major elements found in The Erasers serve as the basic elements in the construction of Dans le labyrinthe (1959; In the Labyrinth, 1960). Therefore, if Robbe-Grillet has been faithful to his theories, he has taken a number of elements from a novel by Greene and created another work from them, a work that stands on its own as a work of art and that contains nothing external to its own writing. Robbe-Grillet does note, however, that the individual reader is perfectly free to interpret any work according to his own interests or preoccupations but adds that such a reading will be only a reflection of that reader’s mind and will have nothing to do with the novel as it stands.

Bibliography

Brock, Robert R. “Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes and Graham Greene’s This Gun for Hire: Imitation or Initiation?” in Modern Fiction Studies. XXIX (Winter, 1983), pp. 688-694.

Gardies, A. Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1972.

Morrissette, Bruce. The Novels of Robbe-Grillet, 1975.

Rahv, Betty T. From Sartre to the New Novel, 1974.

Stoltzfus, B.F. Alain Robbe-Grillet and the New French Novel, 1964.

Sturrock, John. The French New Novel: Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1969.