In the Labyrinth by Alain Robbe-Grillet

First published:Dans le labyrinthe, 1959 (English translation, 1960)

Type of work: New Novel

Time of work: World War II

Locale: A French city

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a doctor
• A Soldier, a young man whose life the narrator tries and fails to save
• A Woman, who shelters the wounded soldier
• A Boy, who helps the soldier find a street
• A lame Man, who is shamming his lameness to avoid fighting in the war

The Novel

Traditional terms of literary analysis such as “plot” and “character” do not apply comfortably to the New Novel form credited to Alain Robbe-Grillet. In a series of essays collected under the title Pour un nouveau roman (1963; For a New Novel, 1965), Robbe-Grillet describes such terms as “several obsolete notions”:

We are so accustomed to discussions of “character,” “atmosphere,” “form,” and “content,” of “message” and “narrative ability” and “true novelists” that it requires an effort to free ourselves from this spider web and realize that it represents an idea about the novel (a ready-made idea, which everyone admits without argument, hence a dead idea), and not at all that..."nature” of the novel in which we are supposed to believe.

With this warning in place, Robbe-Grillet describes his New Novel, in which the act of writing is the form itself, and in which the minute description of objective reality is intertwined with fanciful conjecture, dream states, feverishly subjective distortions, and pure invention, none of which answers to any chronological sequence as assumed in the traditional novel. Nor is character defined in the same way, since no psychologically recognizable or three-dimensional portraits are proffered by the writer. The novel is peopled instead by rather vaguely identified and often amorphous creatures, ambiguous and unstructured, about whom the reader knows only the external details of their lives.

In the Labyrinth, Robbe-Grillet’s fourth novel, stands as his most fully realized example of the theories he only partially succeeded in illustrating in his previous novels. Unraveling the events, which twist and turn in a labyrinthine way, the reader understands that a young soldier is wandering the streets of a French city, seeking to deliver a shoe-box shaped package to the family of another soldier, who died in a hospital. The contents of the package, a mystery which holds the reader’s interest, prove to be unimportant personal belongings, not the bomb or the secret papers suggested by the intrigue of the novel.

The soldier, seen from the perspective of a narrative observer whose own physical position relative to the soldier is open to question, is fevered; much of what is reported can then be seen as the hallucinations of the soldier himself. He enlists the help of a local boy who (depending on the whim of the narrator at various points) skips happily through the snow, holds an umbrella in the rain, or hides the soldier after he has been shot by enemy soldiers. A woman, possibly the boy’s mother, helps the soldier, trying to learn the correct name of the street he seeks and tending his wounds.

In the meantime, the narrator is alone in his room (possibly), where every detail of the mantel, the circular stains made by the ashtray, the fly walking on the lampshade, and the crack in the ceiling is described dispassionately and scientifically. At one point, the narrator looks at a small engraving of a tavern scene, which works itself into the narrative pattern, and describes the scene down to the facial expressions and direction of the gaze of each person in the tavern. The two realities nevertheless blend together; for example, the tavern scene includes a young boy clutching a brown box like the one the soldier carries through the streets of the city. Finally, dying on a bed that may be the woman’s (except that the narrator’s crack on the ceiling is discerned), the soldier is given a third injection of painkiller by the doctor, who refers to himself as “I,” thus identifying himself as the narrator of the entire novel.

In one sense a subjective recounting of real events, and in another sense a conjectural reconstruction, invented in the quiet of the doctor’s room (possibly based on conclusions drawn from the box of letters and insignificant items left behind by his dead patient), the novel never retreats to the traditional forms established by such great French writers as Honore de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert. Instead, it remains in a descriptive mode, devoid of “meaning” or “signification,” refusing all attempts to place a grid of symbolic or universally understood images over the objective descriptions.

The Characters

The reader knows least about the central character, the narrator. He (or she) cannot be described in psychological terms, since it is only as an observer and as a maker of stories that the narrator is available for scrutiny. The narrator is, in turn, the subjective inventor of the other characters in the book, giving them external traits and stances, clothing them, perhaps even adding occasional dialogue, but avoiding any internalization or explication of their motives. Of the woman, the reader learns that she wears an apron; that, unlike her neighbors, she does not run at the sight of the injured soldier; that she has a son; that her husband is feigning his lameness. From this information, the reader is free to draw conclusions.

Because of the objective description of every detail, the narrator’s view is extremely subjective, since everything available to the reader is filtered through this one sensibility. If the narrator could be considered a reliable one, several inferences about the characters could be drawn, but the narrator himself reverses his observations, “erasing” with a “no” the twist or turn that leads nowhere. Thus the soldier may or may not be a spy, a traitor, a coward, or a hero, depending on the narrator’s description of his overcoat, its insignia, and other details of the soldier’s experiences, all of which must be either conclusions drawn from the detective-like observations of the narrator or purely fictive constructions created to fill in details where no evidence is present.

In either case, the term “character” is inaccurate when discussing the traits of a person seen only from the outside and in a convolution of the time frame that disallows even a cause/effect relationship leading to analysis of character. Robbe-Grillet has succeeded in writing a novel without characters in the traditional sense, while at the same time “photographing” in excruciating detail a small group of figures possibly embroiled in subversive activities or possibly living out their lives in helpless innocence.

Critical Context

The first responses to Robbe-Grillet’s novels were mixed. His detractors condemned the purposelessness they saw in the disorder of events, the randomness of detail, and the failure to engross the reader in some emotional or even intellectual way. They pointed to the cinematic techniques, especially the camera-like perspective of the unreliable narrator, as a bastardization of the novel form which allows for multiple perspectives. Other critics praised this “demystification” of the novel, however, and saw Robbe-Grillet as bringing the art of fiction writing into the twentieth century. Several other writers were already dealing with perspectivism, the retelling of the same story from the perspective of several characters. The most successful of these experimenters was William Faulkner in such novels as The Sound and the Fury (1929). Samuel Beckett’s novels, which move forward without benefit of narrator, as an internalized voice recounts and retells the story of the immobile narrative figure, bear some resemblance to Robbe-Grillet’s work, but the physical details, the measurable shapes and so forth, are usually absent in Beckett, replaced by a denuded gray landscape almost antithetical to Robbe-Grillet’s meticulously detailed world.

Robbe-Grillet has been accepted in the literary world as a representative of a group of writers seeking to objectify the experiences of their narrators in a reaction against the romantic or emotional novels of the popular culture. His films, notably L’Annee derniere a Marienbad (1961; Last Year at Marienbad, 1962), have also enhanced his reputation, despite some critics’ objections that the cinematic techniques of the novel are diluted by the overly obvious camera’s eye. In the wake of the postmodernist movement and the postmodern novel, Robbe-Grillet’s experiments with the narrative objectifier are seen as the forerunner to the personalized narrator/writer in the novels of William Gass and Raymond Federman.

It is ironic that, despite Robbe-Grillet’s insistence that his novels bear no signification, they should be dissected by scholars seeking hidden patterns of “symbols” and “codes.” Before choosing a literary career, Robbe-Grillet was a naturalist; the detailed descriptions in his novels have often been compared to the botanist’s minute description of specimens found in nature. Perhaps the best way to understand his work is to see him as a careful observer in the field of human activity, neither drawing conclusions nor interpreting findings but rather reporting exactly what he sees.

Bibliography

Carrabino, Victor. The Phenomenological Novel of Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1974.

Morrissette, Bruce. Intertextual Assemblage in Robbe-Grillet, 1979.

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

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel, 1965.

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