Layout, deconstruction of visibilities

At the beginning of Alain Robbe-Grillet's novelistic enterprise, we shouldn't imagine Balzac, but the fictional device of the bedroom, as systematized by Edgar Poe and popularized by detective fiction. At the heart of the fiction is a room in which an event has taken place, would have taken place. For example, a murder. Fiction doesn't directly represent this event, it doesn't have access to its temporality, to the living actuality of its unfolding, its succession. In the absence of, or rather in addition to, the event, the room is made visible to us, and even identified for us with an optical device. It's not always the same device : chamber of secrets, with its backstage  dark room, with its shutter and clicks  particle gas pedal chamber, where the traces of their trajectory are deposited.

The narrative gives us the layout of the places and, based on this layout, indulges in conjectures about the event. The structure of fiction is ordered by a topology of places : the deployment of a map, in which to conjecture itineraries, the establishment in this map of differential zones : for example, in Les Gommes, from the map of the city, the scene of the crime and the various places where the event reverberates from it : the café, the police station ; finally, the vague zones of indifference to the event : house facades, timber merchants' sheds, the harbor swing bridge, the workers' quarter. In La Jalousie, the entire house, with its light-filtering shutters, functions as a chamber where the enigmatic presence of the event must be assumed. Outside the house, the banana plantation and, beyond it, the city, is the vague zone criss-crossed by itineraries, suggested by the presence of trucks. In Le Voyeur, the rooms seen from outside by Mathias on tour on his native island are superimposed on his childhood bedroom, where he drew in front of the window.

The bedroom set-up seems a priori to privilege the layout of places, this topology of fictional zones, against the sequence of events, which becomes conjectural : not that the event takes a back seat ; but it changes status. It doesn't define an action, it doesn't enter into a plot, not directly at least : the plot is the object of an investigation, it is therefore reflected in the narrative, while the event takes on the status of an enigma.

The primacy of the layout of places over the sequence of events translates, in the economy of the text, in the poetics it implements, into a promotion of the " descriptive ". And indeed Les Gommes opens with a presentation, an exhibition of the café on Rue des Arpenteurs  Le Voyeur, on the boat docking on Mathias's island  La Jalousie, on the terrace of the house.

This term " descriptif ", suggested by Philippe Hamon, must be symptomatic for us : these presentations are not, strictly speaking, descriptions  paradoxically, the point here is not really to give a view of places (a café, a landing stage, a house), to provide a representation of them. Rather, the description provides abstract details of a structure or layout: a description of a job to be filled, an apartment for sale, a museum to visit. Presenting a layout of places, an arrangement of lines and surfaces, far from summoning a descriptive regime of visibilities to counter the narrative regime of events, defeats the visibility of things just as the consistency, the evidence of events is defeated. Visibility, precisely because it is not described but sifted through a descriptive sieve, becomes, like the event, enigmatic. Lines, angles, surfaces and perspectives not only fragment the object being described. They disseminate its visibility, which becomes conjectural. The reader is summoned to construct this visibility, to imagine /// images from descriptive elements that are themselves non-visual, non-iconic. We're in the position of the Diderotian blind man, heir to Descartes, who transposes what it is to see from his two crossed sticks: abscissa and ordinate, the survey of lines and surfaces don't determine a vision, with all that this implies of scopic investment, of a seeing eye taking charge of reality, but rather a structure, a system of relationships, almost a mathematical model that it's a matter, then, of investing.

The challenge, then, is not to show what we shouldn't be able to see, or even to isolate the unseen. Here, we're situated below visibilities, at the geometric level of dispositions, from which, ideally, a representation of things could be conjectured, extrapolated by the reader.

On the one hand, then, the enigma of the event in the room ; on the other, the enigma of the dispositions that order, outside and inside, the visibility of places. The representation of the event is conditioned by the representation of the places, which seems a priori to constitute the visual, local, objectal basis of the narrative. But this apparent basis is itself conditioned by the structural conjecture of a plot (Les Gommes) and soon, more radically, of a matter, a narrative fact (Le Voyeur, La Jalousie). Faced with the descriptive, the narrative is the other horizon of the novelistic scene, as disseminated, as contradictorily originary and undone as it.

Between narrative and descriptive, between these two mechanics of writing, these two processes of inscription that degrade what they bear trace of (the visibility of things and the memory of events), the scene is caught in a corner. The stage here is not a device, not the theatrical device that, in the classical novel economy, orders visibilities, concentrates events, suspends time and detaches meaning and expression from the factitious play of agreed rhetoric. In Robbe-Grillet's work, the stage is wedged into the device of the double séance, séance as representation after the fact, as conjecture based on a literary production, a text, and séance as a return to what has been, to the invisible truth of the being of things:

" The double séance [...] will find its corner BETWEEN literature and truth, between literature and what must be answered to the question what is ?
. This double séance will itself have been caught in a corner, in the middle or suspense of the two parts of a text, only one of which is visible " (Derrida, " La double séance ", 1970, La Dissémination, p. 219.)

The scene is not virtual in itself  on the contrary, it is the living moment of the actualization of the real. But the stage is caught between two virtualities, two conjectures, two disseminations throwing back at each other the responsibility for an origin of representation. What's at stake here in the scene, then, is neither visibility nor event. Both, if we remain within the classical logic of scenic representation, collapse here: physically, the stage is a black hole; below the horizon of events, in a moment whose density becomes abstract, the character loses his footing, there is no longer any meaning. The scene is this "no-meaning" caught between two conjectures, in a corner, where things never cease not to be written, "not to be written" designating the invisible Derridean text, that movement of dissemination specific to narrative and descriptive, which makes up for the failures, holes and gaps in the visible text of narrative. From the moment this substitution is organized, a double invisible text is given to conjecture : this is the double séance.

To this deceptive definition of the post-modern scene, based on the experience of the limits of classical physics, on the overcoming of what this physics can represent in terms of space and /// time, and from there, in terms of visibility, we can however oppose another approach, no longer physical, but metaphysical, or more precisely, deduced from the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics : what is at stake, in the cornering of the scene between the two virtualities of the event and the visibility of places, is not literary representation, or literature as representation (on this side we encounter only disappointment, collapse, the work of negativity), but the expression of being, the actualization of its essence in the beings of the real. The dissémination des étants must then be seen not as a deconstruction, a virtualization of objects, of the scene, of representation, but on the contrary as the post-physical emergence of a non-representational consistency of things, what we might call a metaphysical plasticity of the being of things.

In Le Voyeur, Mathias' tour from house to house repeats the same scenario in indifferent locations :

" Finally, all the houses on the island looked alike " ; " Neither the layout of the places, nor their orientation, provided a sufficient clue " (p. 26) ; and besides " Mathias, fortunately, cared little " (p. 27). So there is little or no visually identifiable space; it's always the same, a zone on the map, an opening in a topology, that is, in an abstract, non-topographical spatiality. Mathias, the voyeur, looks out through the windows :

" We could only see what the electric light illuminated with intensity, at the back of the room : the lamp's truncated cone-shaped shade - a bedside lamp - and the vaguer shape of an upset bed. Standing beside the bed, leaning slightly over it, a male figure raised an arm towards the ceiling.
The whole scene remained motionless. The whole scene remained motionless." " (P. 28.)

This is both the singularity of a room and, taken as part of a series, the momentary, plastic actualization of what a room is. There is no duration, no temporality  " the scene remained motionless ". It's a plastic object, in the face of which there is no subjectivity of a subject looking : in " On voyait seulement... ", the on does not designate a person looking, it refers to an impersonal given-to-see, to the presentation of an object that the reader can mentally manipulate.

Through this manipulation, we experience the limits of the descriptive, the limit to which we can penetrate, in spirit, the room, the degree of detail to which we can descend, the depth to which we can " distinguish ", i.e. discriminate, differentiate, name : never, strictly speaking, see. Discrimination unfolds its process until it reaches the vague, the undifferentiated, " the vaguer form of an upset bed " : there lies the body of the event, and there at the same time ends the possibility of discriminating its form, its meaning. Something is at play of which we perceive only the Mimic, which is perhaps harmless, perhaps terrible : the virtuality of a Pierrot murdering his wife.

The scene resists representation by retreating to the limits of visual discrimination, which render it indistinguishable  its representation also retreats to the limits of the time Mathias can devote to it, caught as he is by the countdown to his tour of the island, the completion of which must coincide with the return of the only boat to the mainland : " Mathias had no time to wait for the sequel - assuming a sequel had to happen. He wouldn't have sworn that the screams were coming from this house " (p. 29).

The recursive temporality in which Mathias is caught immobilizes the man's gesture in an immobile scene, caught in a corner between the indiscernibility of the bed's vague form and the undecidability of the /// of the gesture's completion. Caught in a corner, the gesture remains suspended not as the theatrical expression of a dramatically suspended instant (the pregnant instant of the classical scene), but as the plastic expression of a pure gesture, caught between the two virtualities, the two disseminations of the descriptive of the room and the narrative of the event (cries heard, but coming from where ? pushed by whom ?, from which we might conjecture that a man is beating a woman, or that he is killing her).

Once past the house, Mathias is lost in conjecture. We step out of the scene, out of the plastic seizure it fixes, that it stops in the manner of a metaphysical snapshot :

" Despite the unfinished allure of his gesture, the man moved no more than a statue. Under the lamp, on the bedside table, lay a small blue rectangular object - which must have been a pack of cigarettes. "

We don't see the man. What is emphasized is the rigidity of the unfinished gesture, the statuesque evidence of a disposition delivered, beyond even conjecture, to our mental manipulation. Articulated with the man, or rather with the gesture to which he is reduced, the blue rectangular object presents its plastic consistency of form and color, not its representative visibility as a signifying object : meaning comes after the dash, not as visual evidence, but as mental conjecture  a pack that would contain cigarettes, and therefore a smoker or smokers, an activity, an ethos of characters.

The scene is presented as a model, with its figures, its sketchy coloring, its inaccuracies. In the ordinary activity of the day, it isolates a plastic configuration, wedged between two invisible texts (the shifted cry, Mathias's itinerary) that are also two twists of what is not a point of view, two off-centers, two off-stage folds. The Heideggerian notion of util (Zeug) makes explicit this constitutive cornering of the stage in Robbe-Grillet :

" The Greeks had a very apt term for things : πράγματα, i.e. what one deals with in the commerce that preoccupation establishes (πρᾶξις). [...] The being encountered in preoccupation, let us call the util. [...] In essence, the util is " something that is made for... ". [...] In the structure of " made for " resides a renvoi from something to something. [...] In accordance with its usuality, a util is always issued by its belonging to another util [...]. Never do these things first show themselves each for itself in order then to fill a room as the sum of the real. What is immediately encountered, but not thematically grasped, is the room, which is not grasped as what lies " between the four walls " in the sense of geometric space - but, on the contrary, as the util d'habitation. It is from this that the " aménagement " is shown, and in this the util taken each time " in isolation ". Avant is each time revealed to him as a util." " (Martin Heidegger, Être et temps, 1927, trans. François Vezin, 1986, Gallimard, pp. 104-105.)

In the Voyeur scene, the statuesque gesture of the immobilized man, and, even more obviously, the cigarette pack constitute " utils ". They don't exist in themselves as objects, but constitute πράγματα, elements that we deal with, that enter into a preoccupation : a gesture to do something, to commit an act  a packet for cigarettes, and cigarettes for smoking. Both the gesture and the pack are not there in themselves  they are caught up in this chain of belonging, which is not a chain of events either : no exemplary singularity in the detail of this scene, but the everyday normality of a πρᾶξις, of a chain of preoccupations referring each thing (each util), upstream, to /// downstream, to what it's made for (i.e., other utils).

The man is there for the gesture, and the gesture for, perhaps, the vague form in the bed. The pack is for the cigarettes it contains, these cigarettes, to be smoked. Each util is caught, between two, in this chain of being  it is caught in a corner, in the typographic sense of the term, that is, to use Derridean lexicon, that it is written in this impression that it constitutes a trace in the concatenation of πράγματα.

The mode of presence of utils in the literary scene is not that of the representation of objects on a theatrical stage. What Heidegger designates as " the play " first exists globally, and then details itself not as a list, a sum of objects (or characters), but as a series of functionalities, virtualities of what can be done there, which determine a layout, a disposition.

In the Voyeur scene, the overall apprehension of the room is the first experience we are given, in which a layout is then gradually detailed. Objects then only emerge caught in this arrangement, i.e. not as objects in the geometrical sense, but as utils in the ontological sense, caught in a corner, grasped immobile in the chain of utillage.

The coin is the paradigm from which Heidegger derives this logic of arrangement, which is a logic of device. This Heideggerian room, which is not a medium of representation but an experience of arrangement, defines the dispositif of the room. In the context of device theory, the Heideggerian notion of util, and Derrida's implementation of it as a double séance, can be reformulated more simply: the chamber is a virtual space in which plastic objects meet. At the margins of this plastic evidence, the virtuality of the chamber is twofold, spatial (it may be another place, or equally another place) and temporal (the event must be conjectured). In other words, the three levels of the device change nature : the geometrical becomes topological ; the scopic becomes plastic ; the symbolic becomes enigmatic, each of the levels contributing no longer to the representation of the scene, but to the conjecture of its margins.

In this conjectural device of the room, objects are grasped not as directly visual representations, looked at with all the scopic consistency of a gaze where subjectivity would be caught, but as a global plastic presence, where the object is delivered to the mind for examination, where the place is shown in such a way that we can manipulate it, virtually enter and exit it, turn around it. This mental manipulation of the plastic monstration then inserts the latter into a utillage, a support for conjecture : one would have to ask what it's for, but this question is not formulated discursively, rather it is embodied in the mental manipulation of the scene shown.

In Les Gommes, this shift from the visual theatricality of the classic novel to a new logic of plastic arrangement is not completely complete. The model of the detective novel, in which the dramatic sequence of scenes is reduced to a single, enigmatic scene - the crime scene, which is all about conjecture - serves as a compromise formation in this shift. The visuality of novelistic writing remains a representational horizon, as evidenced by Madame Bax's window, from which the old-young lady is a potential witness to the crime. When Wallas emerges from Albert Dupont's mansion, where he has been interrogating his elderly housekeeper, he is dimly aware that he is being observed from a window in the building opposite:

Wallas is a witness to the crime.

" Wallas, half-turned already, hears the bolt resume its place in the strike ; he lets go of the iron handle and looks up at the house opposite him. Immediately he recognizes, at a window on the second floor, this /// the same embroidered curtain he had noticed several times during his solitary stroll" (P. 108.)

The scene immobilizes Wallas in a posture, it stops his movement, which it captures photographically, or rather plastically, as the presence of a gesture that doesn't make an event (nothing spectacular here, nothing decisive), but manifests itself as " util ", as captured in a chain of πράγματα : the door closes, so Wallas can turn around, he then sees the window opposite. The gesture of Wallas turning around is caught in a corner between the mechanical, necessary, usual movement of the door bolt entering the strike plate, of this engagement for closing, and the no less necessary, usual presence of the window, which introduces by the very play of the layout of the premises, a gaze on the scene, a gaze being taken this time in the architectural, a-subjective sense of the word. The window, and not immediately someone, a subject posted behind it, looks because it is placed there to look. The window is a utility of the gaze.

This very window is desingularized : it's not a particular window, it's a window endowed with the same curtain seen at all windows. Wallas leaves the scene of the crime and finds himself confronted by the voyeuristic gaze of this witness window: formally, the device still follows the arrangements of the classical scene, providing a place for the event and, at its margin, the optical possibility of a point of view. There is a witnessing gaze which, seeing Wallas exit, was able to see the moment, the event of the crime  this gaze articulates, superimposes the present, anodyne scene on an earlier, original, horrific, decisive scene.

But this scenic-optical device is emptied : the reader knows, moreover, that the crime did not take place  he will soon learn that Mme Bax witnessed only indiscernible elements  for the moment, he, is confronted with the neutral opacity of the window : window " util ", which is indeed there to look, but as all windows look, and moreover with the same curtains :

" Behind the loose meshes of the net, Wallas perceives movement, he guesses a silhouette  someone is watching him who, seeing himself uncovered, moves insensitively into the darkened room to get out of sight. A few seconds later, in the window frame, there are only two shepherds bending over the body of a newborn baby. " (P. 108.)

The voyeuristic gaze is turned on its head here  it is no longer that of Mme Bax spying on the street from her window that interests us, but, in reverse, that of Wallas crossing, surprising Mme Bax's, forcing her to step back, to dissolve into the half-light of the back of her room.

Wallas's gaze penetrating the room occupied by Mrs. Bax prefigures that of Mathias in Le Voyeur penetrating from the outside into the interiors he captures in passing, during his tour as a representative on the island. Strictly speaking, this is no longer a look, since what he grasps is not visual: Wallas " perceives ", " guesses " an insensible displacement. He experiences the vague, he shifts from the visual to the conjectural, he apprehends the uncertain movement of an indiscernible silhouette towards the shadow where it will dissolve. This silhouette exists only as " util " : something, barely someone, who is there to look at, who is made for it, who, from the point of view of fiction, is reduced to this usuality, that is, to the possibility of this use.

Wallas's eye then withdraws from this interiority of the room that has become indiscernible and stops for a moment at the window interface, on the mesh curtain : the focus of the image is on this curtain depicting a Adoration of the Shepherds  the representation of the Adoration screens the room of utils, the cornered grasp of conjectures. It takes us back to the /// theatrical logic of the stage, with a new reference to Oedipus, which like the others is not there to deliver a hidden, tragic or psychoanalytic meaning of the Gommes, but to point out the splintering, the dissemination, the insignificance henceforth of this scenic representative model.

The curtain plays a junk scene, a Adoration of the Shepherds bought in the supermarket, which, referring not to the shepherds of the Gospels, but to the shepherd rescuing abandoned Oedipus, indicates the virtuality of what the theatrical scene would be there if there were one, and, by difference, what this scene has become : an accommodation in the room, a cheap purchase ; not of meaning, but of savings. All that remains of this stage performance are these screen curtains, a simple " util ".

In La Jalousie, the shift to a pure logic of plastic arrangement is complete. Paradoxically, while all the novelistic material seems to be organized into a gigantic " donné-à-voir " of which the house of A... would be the setting, there is no gaze (always in the full sense of the word, of a subject implementing a scopic impulse in this gaze) on what Christian Michel designates as a " panoptic "¹. There is no " I ", no identifiable subject, watching this " panoptic ". The character of the husband, or of the narrator, are creations of the critic to try to maintain a minimal operative of narratological categories on a text that in fact escapes them completely.

The " panoptic " constituted by the house in the plantation, with its jalousies that both filter and partially let us see, is not looked at  it is presented. This is the Heideggerian room, with its arrangements and deployment of " utils " that contribute to the overall grasp of a materiality, a plastic reality of things, of πράγματα, from which not a character, but, outside fiction, the reader will establish his conjectures, arrange the scene in the double session of its virtualities. In La Jalousie, Franck and A...'s discussions about the book they have just read put into abyme the use Robbe-Grillet intends for his novel:

" They also sometimes deplore the fortuitousness of the plot, saying that "it's bad luck", and then construct another probable course of events based on a new hypothesis, "if it hadn't happened". Other possible forks in the road present themselves, all leading to different endings. The variants are numerous  the variants of the variants even more so. They even seem to multiply them for pleasure " (p. 83).

This is not simply a matter of the pleasure of conjecture, which would be a tribute to the imaginative experience of all reading. This imagination is formalized in bifurcations, routes, itineraries. A topology of variants takes shape, something akin to a map, but a proliferating map that would detail the infinite possibilities of layout, that would seek to exploit all the virtual functionalities that meet along the line of the plot. The initial model of the discursive line (" the hazards of the plot ", " another probable unfolding ") turns into a skein, becomes globalized, spatialized.

Facing this virtual proliferation, Franck then opposes the compact unity of the event, the book's choice of a single, simple denouement :

"  "But by misfortune, he just happened to come home early that day, which no one could have foreseen." 
Franck thus sweeps away in one fell swoop the fictions they've just built up together. There's no point in making these contrary suppositions, since things are what they are : you don't change anything about reality. " (P. 83.)

Against the proliferation of hypotheses and variants, the obvious, or rather, the plasticity of things  imposes itself: what we can touch, what we can manipulate, is this reality (all relative, since it's a novel, and even a novel within a novel), a reality that imposes itself not as an event (he came home earlier, it's neither extraordinary nor heroic, it's simply what was), but as the compactness of the fact, as the obligatory passage from now on for the spawning of the imagination, as the inescapable brick of the fictional lego.

" He precisely came home earlier that day " : this is the scene, caught in a corner between all the conjectures, conjectures that classic fiction reduces, eliminates, " this book that has been occupying them for some time " (p. 82)  conjectures that Robbe-Grillet solicits on the contrary, who immediately articulates to the novel scene discussed by Franck and by A... the breakdown scene that has just happened to them :

" Yet, he says, it had begun very well. " (P. 84.)

That it started well could be a priori the idyll in the book they've been reading, abruptly interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a jealous man. We soon realize that this is in fact Franck's little jaunt into town with A..., ruined when their truck breaks down, forcing them to take a room " in this poor hotel " (p. 88). But the possibility of a love scene in the hotel, or even, as Christian Michel supposes, of a sexual fiasco involving " such a bad mechanic ", remains purely conjectural. The story, on the other hand, places the scene in the book before the possibility of a scene between Franck and A... in the hotel, in such a way that the reader is led to superimpose them, to fill in the gaps in one with the gaps in the other. On the one hand, the conjecture of an event, the denouement of a novel's plot; on the other, the conjecture of an itinerary, this escapade in the city that failed in a poor hotel. The scene here is caught in the in-between of a session after the reading and a session after the breakdown : invisible, unknowable, lacunar, it nevertheless imposes itself, because " things are what they are : you can't change anything about reality " (p. 83).

The Nouveau Roman was experienced as a radical critique of Balzacian realism, and, through this critique, as the end of literature. My aim here is to show that the Balzacian model was not in fact what Robbe-Grillet's writing was up against. What's at stake is not a certain way of representing reality. What's at stake is representation itself, insofar as it ceases to be the object of literature. Just because Robbe-Grillet was interested in cinema, and practiced it, doesn't mean that this literature of post-representation is a literature of the gaze: the visual material that enters massively into the novel's material first organizes a disposition of places that always comes down to the layout of the Heideggerian utility room. The scene becomes this layout, wedged in, caught between two, by the double game of conjecture about places and events, descriptive and narrative. The visibility of what is given to see thus does not order a stage in the classical, theatrical sense of the term : it undoes the gaze and promotes the plasticity of things.

Notes