Narrative devices in Robbe-Grillet's Angélique

I. Angélique : from meaning to installation

Autobiography and photography

The modern rise of autobiography is deeply linked to the technological revolution that over the past two centuries has brutally transformed all processes of representation. Whereas painting oneself was a challenge, forcing the artist to simultaneously occupy two antagonistic positions in relation to the canvas, the photographic snapshot technically solves the problem: all you have to do is stand in front of the lens, and the economy of the model simplifies matters. But above all, the art of painting presupposes posing, the public circuit of the gaze, the theatricality of an exposed scene. Snapshots, on the other hand, can accommodate the intimate  they don't have to enter into the pageantry of a scenography  taken on the spur of the moment, in the carelessness of an unprepared moment, snapshots can give an account of an inside that no language has covered, of a naked brutality of the " me " that no convention has aestheticized.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the manuscript of the Confessions preserved in Neuchâtel, already objected to " ingenious novels built on a few external acts " which one " linked by strokes of invention "¹, constructing from scratch the smooth, artificial line of a narrative between theatrical and conventional scenes. The fabrication of such a " physionomie " of the self has nothing to do with the authenticity of the autobiographical project that Rousseau claims to be implementing : " how would one make us know this interior modelle, that he who paints it in another cannot see, and that he who sees it in himself does not want to show ? "

This is indeed the imposture of the self-portraitist painter that is denounced, in a discourse where autobiographical writing is entirely modeled by the image. To the artifice of portrait painting, Rousseau opposes work in the darkroom:

The artist's work is the result of his own experience.

" If I want to make a carefully written work like the others, I won't paint myself, I'll blush myself. This is about my portrait, not a book. I'm going to work, so to speak, in the dark room  no other art is needed than to follow exactly the features I see marked. " (P. 1154.)

The art of writing, the homogeneous craftsmanship of a style, here identified with painting and its caricature, make-up, stand in opposition to the optical mechanism invented by Leonardo da Vinci, which enables a raw image of reality to be projected into the darkroom and, if not yet fixed photographically, at least traced. To the scene of " exterior acts ", Rousseau thus contrasts the chamber of " moi "², a space that is certainly not invisible, but a space that spares within itself, that secretes invisibility, a space that is both total and restricted, to which only it will have access and of which it will only be able to give an account by systematically defusing all the rhetorical, scenographic devices of its representation.

The chamber of the autobiographical self is remarkable only for this paradoxical invisibility :

That if my enterprise is singular the position that makes me do it is no less so. Among my contemporaries there are few men whose name is better known in Europe and whose individuality is more ignored. My books ran through the cities, while their Author only ran through the forests. Everyone read me, everyone criticized me, everyone talked about me, but in my absence  I was as far from speeches as from men  I knew nothing of what was said. Every man figured me according to his fancy, without fear that the original would contradict him." (P. 1151.)

However The Confessions will not re-establish this presence, will not build this image that has been missing, since their project is to tell what has been, and thus /// precisely to give an account of an absence that was decisive. The point is not to abolish the invisibility of Rousseau's " moi " through writing, but quite the contrary, to represent it, to communicate it, to constitute it as an object of knowledge, study, even enjoyment.

Narrative matrix and narrative device

A writing device is thus emerging that is radically opposed to the scenic device : whereas the stage, the painting, the portrait, lifting the screen of representation³, make visible what should never have been delivered to the public gaze, Rousseau's autobiography circumscribes the space of invisibility of the " moi ", and uses this invisibility to denounce the artifices of representation. This is not a stage device, but a narrative device, whose fundamental material is the space of invisibility, the darkroom of the " moi ". This device, though it manipulates the invisible, produces images (or snapshots) and presupposes an even closer involvement of writing in the visual processes of representation : writing mimes the camera and, to do so, opens up within itself that resistance to the image constituted by the darkroom of the " moi ".

The narrative will then no longer be analyzed as the line of a narrative (or facticity of the inventio), but as the repetition of a narrative matrix, i.e. as a repeated failure⁴ in the figuration of what Rousseau designates as the " modelle intérieur ", whose unrepresentable, anti-scenic character is repeated again and again. The narrative matrix is the primitive scene of autobiography, an anti-scene we should say, since without screen, without the distance of a gaze, without the surface of a place, it carries the secret of the intimate reach from which the " moi " began to exist⁵. All subsequent scenes will screen the primitive anti-scene, a simple, brutal configuration of an injury suffered and destined to be repeated. Photography's inflation of reproduction feeds this logic of repetition, inviting us to consider narrative not as the linear unfolding of a narrative from scene to scene, but as the global arrangement of heterogeneous snapshots, what Rousseau calls " la bigarrure " (p. 1154), where installation substitutes for narrative.

Thematization of the mechanical image in Robbe-Grillet

Replaced in the Rousseauist perspective, the autobiographical enterprise of Alain Robbe-Grillet's Romanesques no longer proves as paradoxical as it seems in the context of the generalized deconstruction of the subject that inhabits the writing of the new novel⁶. Here, we'll focus on the central part of the triptych, Angélique ou l'enchantement, published in 1987⁷ : first, the table of contents, detailed in the manner of a thesis or Jesuit scholarly summary, symptomizes the shift from narrative to installation by making visible not the articulations of a discourse, but quite the contrary, the maze of snapshots⁸, " these disjointed images whose threads I am patiently trying to reconnect⁹ " (p.104), among which the reader can choose a route. The mechanical image is no longer a mere metaphor, external to the content: it swarms throughout the narrative.

It begins with the engraving of " the last moments of Princess Aïcha " discovered while leafing through a bouquiniste on Boulevard Pasteur's Peines capitales en Turquie à la fin du XVIIe siècle¹⁰, " beautiful, manic engraving " of a young girl disemboweled by a plow, far more " satisfactory " than " the photographic documents " (pp. 52-57), yet repeated and reproduced in L'Éden et après (p. 57). Then comes Brunehaut's torture, engraved in Henri Martin's Histoire de France (p. 59), then an " illustration of a tale by Boccaccio " featuring a " pretty undressed girl pursued by dogs through the undergrowth "¹¹ and which " is now to be found in Le jeu avec le feu, my penultimate film " (p. 62). These sadistic images, the author says, were born of the modest and heroic chromos of the '14 war, " legendary exploits reported by l'Illustration where they were accredited by sepia-colored engravings with a strong fantastical effect, like the one that remained famous showing Lieutenant-Colonel Henri de Corinthe charging, a few years later, saber in the clear at the head of his dragons... " (p. 104)¹². Then comes a photographic evocation, " an old amateur photograph, yellowed, weathered, taken in Germany " (p. 114) which, in a probable nod to La Chambre claire, depicts the writer's mother. Then fleetingly resurfaces " a black-and-white engraving from l'Illustration " (p. 122), similar to the dream of L'Homme aux loups freudien¹³.

But the nostalgic, perverse evocation of engravings soon gives way to cinema, with which, as we've seen, Robbe-Grillet has from the outset woven relationships of analogy and continuity. Robbe-Grillet combines the autobiographical experience of filmic creation with a reflection on the nature of this image, and, like Eisenstein, claims its shock function (pp.177-178): the semiological shock technically implemented by filmic montage, through the deconstruction of the " raccord " (pp.180-184), is superimposed on the phantasmatic shock of the sadistic scenarios in the engravings, constituting the new narrative device. We'll come back to the fantasy of Angélique, which then emerges more and more clearly as the narrative matrix of the story.

The hole and the pan

The first observation that stands out in the face of this overabundance of images, material images before they are memories, images seen rather than experienced, is their exteriority in relation to traditional autobiographical scenography. Shock images, they are not a priori sign images, they do not draw the social exteriority of a physiognomy, a character, a figure, but refer to the intimate configuration of a violation, a fantasy, a perverse scenario, to what is played out in the bedroom of the " moi "¹⁴.

Repetition of a shock, reproduction of a configuration, perversion of the image : there can be no discourse here, no project of signification :

" So I can't share Philippe Lejeune's opinion on putting memories into text. "The demand for meaning is the positive and primary principle," he says, "of the autobiographical quest." No, no ! Certainly not! [...] For me, in particular, there can be no question of attributing any profound unity to these precarious diamond moments, or then to these swathes of fog that refuse both the use of the historical past, the only certified guarantee of coherence, continuity, chronology, causality, non-contradiction. " (P. 67-68.)

The value of autobiographical memory lies not in its ability to make sense, to fit into a chain of signs, but precisely on the contrary in its precariousness, its contradictory lability, by which it resists and escapes the chains of the /// speech. The Proustian yellow wall, from which a whole interior world is ordered, is opposed here by " pans de brume ", these holes in the memory, these faults, these gaps that prevent the reduction of memorial matter to an organized discourse¹⁵.

We're not talking here simply about forgetting, i.e. gaps in an already constituted narrative. The hole is qualified as a pan, it is already surface and matter, even before a discourse is ordered. The pan de brume essentially constitutes the literary thing, as that blurred beyond, that vague perception in the face of which language skids, while therein lies the essential stakes of what it is to communicate¹⁶. " Soon enough, I must return to the indefinite and the instantaneous " concludes the novelist. But the instantaneous does not only refer to memory  it also characterizes the culmination of photographic technique, when the latter, totally freed from the protocols of pictorial representation that it began by apetizing, sovereignly sets its sights on anything to snap, quickly and in abundance, so that the circumstance of the instantaneous is very likely to be forgotten or confused. The snapshot therefore has no exemplary meaning, no exceptional value  it would be futile to begin a quest from it, to construct a discourse of which it would constitute the heart and culmination.

Overabundance of snapshots and narrative meta-level

The value of the snapshot is, on the contrary, that of the pan de brume : in the midst of dozens of others, it constitutes or rather mimes the elusive fabric of memory. It is no longer the theatrical, unique, hypertrophied focal point of the performance stage  it now provides the material pierced by the invisible (everything we don't see in it makes its value) and fringed by the incomprehensible (the exact circumstances are lost) of something that is not discourse, but returns to the foundations of narrative :

" The patient writing of the fragments that remain (provisionally, I know) can in no way consider my past as a producer of signification (a meaning to my life), but on the contrary as a producer of narrative : a becoming to my project as a writer. " (P. 67.)

Fragment writing¹⁷ is not poor writing. On the contrary, overwhelmed by the abundance of snapshots, she collects and piles up; she undertakes a gigantic work of collage, of superimpositions, where the same thing is repeated, varied, taken up again with minute displacements. The narrative of the new novel is a narrative of consumer society, which accumulates and wastes, overconsumes and discards. This is why the model of the narrative line no longer suits him; caught up in the flow of excess material, the novelist can only dominate his subject at a meta-level of the text: not at the level of meaning, decidedly too cluttered and scattered, but at the level of the project, " my project as a writer ". His book will not be a narrative, but one, or even several narrative devices. The device is the meta-level from which textual overabundance can be dominated.

So it's not a question of signifying, of extracting the meaning of a life, but of arranging, of constructing a writer's project. We'll show that this very formulation, still very Proustian, is overtaken in Angélique, where the project itself is hollowed out, deconstructed, to the benefit of the denudation of the literary thing itself, its anguishing emptiness, its horror and intimate brutality.

II. Structure of Angélique

Instant versus cliché

Alain Robbe-Grillet claims to be part of structuralism ; he participates in its movement. For him, the deconstruction of meaning and the linearity of discourse is part of the structuralist paradigm shift:

Alain Robbe-Grillet claims to be part of the structuralist movement.

" Quant /// to the organization of narratives, in one case (the so-called fictions) as in the other (the pseudo autobiographical researches), I recognize without difficulty that they represent the same hope, in various forms, of bringing into play the same two impossible questions - what is it, me ? And what am I doing here? - which are not problems of meaning, but of structure. So it's not a question of reassuring myself with false, fixed coherences, plastered on from the outside. " (P. 69.)

To undo the line of discourse and get out of the problems of signification, we're going to have to enter into that logic of interaction and communication that Roland Barthes defines in the preface to his Essais critiques : the thing, the matter, the intimate and unrepresentable human " ça " that literature is intended to communicate can only be represented, despite everything, by means of a structure, a structural meta-level governed by two principles, the principle of indirection, which bypasses what cannot be directly represented, and the principle of variation, which, avoiding the conventional detour, gives the illusion of rediscovered authenticity. These two principles derive from the photographic logic of the snapshot: taken impromptu, without prior framing or scenic arrangement, the snapshot does not directly deliver meaning, but derives its value precisely from the unpreparedness that guarantees its authenticity. The snapshot is not in the text: it constitutes a certain implementation of reality, which the text transcribes. The snapshot is an arrangement with reality. It is what of the real is seized, and how it is seized twice, at the moment of the instant and at the moment of its recollection. The snapshot is indirect  it shows something other than what it shows  the photographic snapshot conjures up and varies the rhetorical cliché  the view has value only as a departure from the stereotype. Reduced to a logic of the instantaneous, the Barthesian model of literature as a system of communication obviously loses its universality : but the depth of history and confrontation with other literatures of the world, with those in particular that place their art in performative repetition and timeless celebration, teach us that nothing is less universal than a conception of literature as a system of communication.

The principles of indirection and variation that govern the construction of the message in the literary system of communication according to R. Barthes thus refer to what about photographic technique is irreducible to previous techniques : the unpreparedness of the object and the multiplication of views. A third level of representation then emerges, which is neither that of discursive linearity nor that of textual structure, but that of device: the snapshot implements or reveals a device. The principle of indirection then defines, for the narrative, the space of representation as a space of invisibility and incomprehensibility : what cannot be said directly becomes what must be circumvented spatially, an inaccessible place, a hole in memory, a patch of mist¹⁸. The principle of variation then appears as the reparation of this lack, the compensation for this disquieting invisibility : it's a question of multiplying snapshots in an attempt to palliate this original defect, to compensate through the abundance of views for the fact that the very thing, the intimate " ça " that constitutes the object of literature, is never seen.

The principle of indirection or the reversion of the gaze

What's the thing in Angélique ? As impossible as it is to answer, the question doesn't seem a priori very mysterious, and Robbe-Grillet provides the statement, which we've already quoted : " what is it, me ? And what am I doing here ? ".

It's true /// that Angélique opens with the writer and his mirror face to face. More precisely, the text begins by tending towards this face-to-face : from the shapes the writer imagines " in the once vivid floral wallpaper " (p. 7) of his room in his father's Maison Noire in Brittany, we move on to the vision of this same house from outside and under the snow, itself identified with the mysterious figure of Lieutenant-Colonel and Count Henri de Corinthe, the father's war comrade and savior (p. 10). The sky and the clouds are reflected on the windows of the manor house. But the luminosity changes, and the glass in the study loses its mirror-like reflection, revealing Henri de Corinthe's face (p.12), in Robbe-Grillet's original place. The two faces, the one looking in and the one surprised from the outside, are thus superimposed. After this detour, the face of the one asking " what is it, me ? " can finally emerge :

" for it is indeed me whose reflection has just emerged from the darkened depths of the mirror (which surprised me with its fortuitous presence at an unexpected angle : turned a few degrees from the normal position I'm used to), which occupies the entire single-leaf door (left ajar by exception) of the heavy solid mahogany mirror cabinet, made by a local craftsman for my great-grandfather Marcelin Perrier from a log of island wood washed ashore after a shipwreck. " (P. 14.)

The point here is not to evade the portrait, which will come in its own time, but to construct a narrative device from the accumulation of snapshots, fleeting, unprepared views that circumscribe a space of invisibility, the very surface on which to draw the figure of the writer. What will this surface be? The wall of romantic phantasmagoria? The Albertian window frame ? The mirror in the wardrobe? This mirror will finally welcome the figure, not because it's cleaner, but precisely because, unlike other surfaces, it's unprepared for it. The impromptu mirror, spinning on the hinges of a door that " decidedly does not hold closed " (p. 34), is the ideal surface, because precarious and incongruous, of the instantaneous.

The first snapshot, of phantasmagorias in wallpaper, is taken in reverse : the novelist sees instead of being seen  this reversal of the gaze gives the principle of linear deconstruction¹⁹ and constitutes the narratological interdict (to tell is to lie) as the threshold of narrative²⁰. The interdict disseminates the figures and triggers the mechanics of repetition²¹. The second snapshot, of the house under the snow, does indeed move from the outside inwards, but in an even more disappointing way, as the snow " adjective " compared to " the surface of a stage curtain " (p. 10), then the windows turned into mirrors weave an envelope of invisibility. The third snapshot finally mediates a possible and permitted representation: Henri de Corinthe writing his memoirs is both the Other of the narrative and the Same, since he shares with Robbe-Grillet the same mystery of origins, the same intimate injury linked to the history of the father (or friend), an injury that precisely deconstructs this history.

Stepping out of the image: from structure to device

In the writer's memory, Count Henri emerges from the image of the house, itself projected as the reverse, the exteriority of the initial face-to-face encounter with the flowery wallpaper. Henri returns from the outside as a figure of the inside, as a repetition of the same intimate thing, this intimate and blind figure, unknowable to the writer, of himself writing²².

We have traced the detour taken by the narrative to achieve an indirect figuration of the writer at his worktable, to establish the paradoxical foundation that J.Derrida refers to as blind memory²³. In this detour, we have seen the principle of indirection at work. But is it really this thing, this narcissistic yet disembodied hypertrophy, that Angélique  is essentially about? Isn't there something else at stake, revealed precisely by the detour and eluded by its outcome ? Isn't the writer's meagre story weighed down and overhung by the adventure and mystery of the father ? And isn't this mystery merely a prolegomena to the mystery surrounding the lieutenant-colonel of Corinth²⁴, itself set on the threshold of the mystery of Angélique that gives the novel its name ? In other words, while the structure of the novel describes a vast detour leading ultimately to Robbe-Grillet's artistic project, whose point of departure is his figure as a writer writing at his table, and whose culmination - his cinematic work, the novel's device reveals an entirely different quest which, far from heading towards the intimate heart of the writing self, gradually moves away from it to identify the literary thing with the infigurable image of Angélique. The man who undertakes, according to a philosophically concerted project, to write his memoirs, and fails in the process, is Henri de Corinthe : Robbe-Grillet in his own autobiographical project encounters this failed project of the mysterious Other, which he superimposes on his own work, whose fascinated attraction he undergoes, and by which he finds himself decisively diverted towards something else.

" I'm getting lost. It should be about Corinth (not about me) and, in the first place, about what we can still gather today as testimonies... " (P. 24.)

The principle of variation : brouillage, brouillon, brouillard

The structure of the quest, which is the fundamental structure modeled by structuralism (from the actantial schemas of a Propp and then a Greimas to Todorov's elucidation of the image in the carpet), is thus blurred here by a clever play of screens that envelop, decentralize and finally disseminate what is at stake and the object of research, no longer the project of a writer, but the attraction of the feminine thing, which manifests itself under composite traits and is loosely federated by the name of Angélique.

For want of a clear object of research, it is indeed a blurring²⁵ that the wallpaper of the Maison Noire office, on whose surface the book opens, immediately sets in motion. If at first we see " the obvious shapes of a busted nose, a fine moustache " (p. 7), foreshadowing the " very marked, distinctly convex nose that I inherited from my mother and which in family folklore is called 'the Perrier nose' " (p. 14), it's finally a first approximation of Angélique that takes shape :

" Occasionally, though all too infrequently, in the blur of foliage and uncertain corollas, the unsettling smile of a pretty girl emerges more fleetingly, but elusive, vaporous, ready to vanish behind the shifting outlines of bouquets and garlands, themselves erased by time, faded, blurred, interrupted, especially in those areas of the wall where the light from outside strikes the tapestry with its immemorial pattern directly, to the left, for example, of the knotty walnut desk where, leaning at an angle among the scattered leaves of my successive drafts, I now write the trembling name of Angélica... " (P.8.)

Angélique's failing image is a projection of the writer's and embodies his project as a writer²⁶. Scrambling tends towards the literary. From the " brouillés " motifs of wallpaper, we move on to Robbe-Grillet's " brouillons successifs ", to which Henri de Corinthe's " les multiples brouillons successifs " (p. 12) and Manrica's " image brouillée " (p. 93) respond. Similarly, the blurring of figures, the scrambling of text, is matched by the " pans de brume " of reality (p. 41) and memory (p. 68), this mist²⁷ present from the very first pages of the text, but whose presence only becomes decisive during the novel's truly inaugural event, the meeting between Robbe-Grillet's father, Henri Robin, and the old man with the scythe on the road in the forest of Perthes on November 20, 1914.

Scramble, scramble, scramble : the principle of variation ceaselessly hijacks the image at the moment when it seeks to accomplish itself in a fixed form, to characterize itself as a sign and signify as a figure of a discourse ; it transforms the image into another image itself in turn threatened by discursive fixation  so, strictly speaking, it does not vary in Angélique a pre-existing form , a message that would already exist in the repertoire of conventional forms of discourse. It's not a question of proposing the original formulation, varied therefore, of an agreed discourse. On the contrary, the text of Angélique unfurls all the forms, the whole series of what should be identified more with a narrative matrix than with a discourse, and which materializes as a series of mise en images, of settings of interrupted images. Variation is thus now internal to the narrative, and scrambling is both the effect and the challenge of this variation. A blurring of the narrative, a blurring of the text and thus of its structure, a blurring of the space of representation : here we find the three levels of narrative, narratological²⁸, structural²⁹ and semiological³⁰. The implementation of the principle of variation brings out these three levels : losing the thread of what is being told, losing the logic of the arrangement of interrupted fragments, and finally confronting the swathes of mist, the essential drift of the text, its intimate materiality of shock below meaning, thing-hole and thing-pan designated by approximation " the trembling name of Angelica ".

Alberich's golden ring

Here we touch on the tipping point from structure to device, which allows us to think of structure as a formation of compromise between the civilization of text and that of image, with the textual hole turned inside out into an iconic pan. This essential reversal, which constitutes Robbe-Grillet's unacknowledged project, unconscious of itself, is allegorized, as it were, by the inaugural parable of Alberich's golden ring:

The golden ring of Alberich's golden ring of Alberich's golden ring of Alberich's golden ring of Alberich's golden ring of Alberich.

" It is its central emptiness - an absence of gold - that constitutes it as a ring, just as the fundamental lack that punctures the center of man appears as the original locus of his project of existence, i.e., of his freedom. Ultimately, only a core of nothingness determines his concrete thickness, and it is the absence of being within it that projects him outside himself as being-in-the-world, as world-consciousness, as self-consciousness, as becoming. " (P. 22.)

Robbe-Grillet cites his sources : Kojève's seminar on Hegel at the ENS, which Henri de Corinthe would have attended  upstream, then, La Phénoménologie de l'esprit and the legend of the Nibelungen from which Wagner drew his tetralogy. Downstream, " Georges Bataille, André Breton, Klossowski, Sartre, Aron, Lacan, not to mention the faithful Raymond Queneau " (p. 22). The Lacanian ring here is not his Mœbius ring, but the system of three intertwined rings, only one of which needs to be cut to free /// the other two, by which Lacan figures feminine jouissance. Lacan evokes the Nibelungen, but also refers to Ecclesiastes :

" All is vanity, no doubt, enjoy the woman you love, that is, make a ring of this hollow, this emptiness that is at the center of your being, there is no neighbor if not this very hollow that is within you, it is the emptiness of yourself³¹. "

The biblical formula is then summed up lapidary :

" give her [=the woman] what you do not have, since what can unite you to her is only her jouissance " (Seminar D'un Autre à l'autre, session of November 13, 1968).

The ring thus images a fundamental and foundational existential depression  it is the woman's sex understood as the locus of an jouissance that constitutes both the most sublime human exchange and the most manifest deception : given by the man and yet wholly within the woman, residing in the ring's void, of which gold is merely the turn. Man's knowledge of this unknowable pleasure, of what is most absolute and radical as otherness and strangeness, is in fact self-knowledge. Such is the message of the Lacanian Ecclesiastes, which gives coherence to the scrambled system of Angélique's two quests, the autobiographical quest of the novelist Narcissus and the perverse quest of Angélique and the sadistic jouissances with which she will gradually be identified.

The sequence of fragments from the father's story, mingled with those from Henri de Corinthe's story, always responds to this device of the ring : to install in the space of representation an essential void, " a nucleus of nothingness ", and to identify this void, this unknowable, with the " project of existence " which autobiography strives to account for, a project, let's remember, without meaning. The narrative matrix that is reduplicated in the text and polymerizes to saturation can be identified with Alberich's golden ring. The narrative device consists in organizing the series of these rings, i.e., in maintaining a certain permanence of the unknowable space around which the narrative matrix is ordered, beyond narrative jumps, narrative breaks, changes of time, place and character. This space of invisibility, this swath of mist, this precarious, impossible, elusive snapshot, then tends to identify the emptiness and existential questioning that inhabits the ring with the sleight of hand of feminine jouissance by which man " makes ring of this hollow ".

III. Angélique's fantasy

None of the episodes recalled are first episodes. Each time it's a variation on an already existing narrative : reality is a rewriting of representation. The encounter between Henri Robin and the old man with the upside-down scythe is an adaptation of the Breton legend of the ankou, the cart of death. Henri de Corinthe's discovery of Manrica at the fountain in the steep basin (p. 92) is inspired by the end of Siegfried, when the hero learns from the birds (in Robbe-Grillet it's a warbler, cf. p. 73) that a beautiful woman is sleeping in the forest amid a circle of flames : Siegfried awakens Brunehilde, who falls in love with him.

It's as if the Barthesian principle of variation were taken in reverse : the novelist is not aiming for the unique singular authenticity of the unedited message, event, narrative, but quite the opposite, the inscription of the fragment in the depth of culture and history. We've seen how the cupboard in which the novelist's face was fleetingly reflected - unless it was Count Henri's - was not simply the cupboard that stood there, but "the heavy, solid mahogany cupboard, made by a local craftsman for my great-grandfather Marcelin Perrier from a log of island wood". /// washed ashore after a shipwreck " (p. 14), overloaded with details that are unnecessary to the unfolding of a narrative and that we even suspect are responsible for plummeting it with their circumstantial gratuity. What is sought here, less than the authenticity of the wardrobe and the possible Benjaminian aura of the singular object inscribed in a story, is the mimetic effect of heaviness that camps the object, the disproportion of this heaviness and the fleetingness of the reflection, above all so that this reflection doesn't make sense too quickly, doesn't give matter to an autobiographical discourse.

In the same way, the legendary or literary inscription of the memory does not give it an auratic added value, a kind of antiquarian patina like an authenticity supplement : on the contrary, it discredits the narrative and deconstructs the realistic illusion by pointing out the artifice, the fundamental unrealism of the story. This narrative must reveal nothing other than that nothing of the golden ring, where the other jouissance is at stake.

The deceptive dimension of the narrative device, which gives itself to be seen as a device but fundamentally gives nothing to be seen in the narrative, nothing but this space of invisibility where the pure and perverse game of jouissance is played out, is opposed to the promises of the scenic device. The narrative device establishes itself on the ruins of scenic theatricality, which it deconstructs.

Such is the case with " the figure of Henri de Corinthe " : the childhood scene in which this figure should have been revealed to the narrator is the missing scene around which the narrative is first ordered.First there's the child's questioning of his father in the "weapons room" of the Black House, while "the monumental oak stump" burns. As the father's rare, disappointing words about his illustrious friend's " adventurous plans " (p. 25) fade away, so does the flamboyant description of the burning log :

" Its tormented forms, its rifts, its caverns, its sinuosities whose outgrowths and volutes seemed to twist in the changing glow of the flames, like the folds of some forest giant metamorphosed into a dragon, with spurts of fire, sudden conflagrations, explosions, sprays of sparks, all made up a dazzling and dramatic spectacle that my father had, in a whisper, compared to the burning of Walhalla after Siegfried's death. At that moment, I posed the question of 'libertarian socialism' as Corinth and his friends conceived it... " (P. 26)

The spectacle, the theatrical dimension of the performance, is monopolized by the strain while the discourse at stake, a dubious discourse moreover of conservative, Germanophile revolution very close to falling into Nazi attraction, is deferred, evaded, constantly postponed³². The flamboyant heaviness of the stump deconstructs the existential interrogation of libertarian socialism just as the familial heaviness of the wardrobe deconstructed the figure of Count Henri. This adjectival heaviness of objects only illusorily consecrates the triumph of description : it's essentially a question of displacing spectacle from the sphere of discourse, of using objects to screen discourse and strike it with invisibility, retroceding it to shadow and mystery : to dazzle with a stump in order not to give voice to, or rather to reduce to its spectral dimension, a discourse stricken with suspicion, ideologically incorrect.

The place, with the same inaccessible father and flamboyant stump, reappears a few pages later. This time, Monsieur de Corinthe is present in the arms room, and the child, relegated to his room upstairs, would like to catch a glimpse of the mysterious guest who is systematically denied him. We recognize here the ingredients of the Proustian bedtime scene, where the father's pronazi friend is superimposed, with dubious taste, on Swann.

" It's this same doll /// of rags, submissive and soft as can be, that I clutched to my chest as I climbed up the grand staircase of the Maison Noire alone. I wanted to see Monsieur de Corinthe through the poorly closed door of the downstairs room, whose overly vast dimensions and areas of darkness, even in normal times, already frightened me. I only caught a glimpse of the monstrous oak stump burning in the hearth. " (P. 31)

Everything is set up for the stage break-in : downstairs, in the hall, the dialogue between the father and his host unfolds the scene of origins, unveiling the mystery of this paternal affair dating back to the war and from which Robbe-Grillet's writing career would be decided. From the staircase, defying the father's prohibition, the child gains access to the vision and knowledge that were denied him.

Nothing of the sort, however. Once again, the child sees nothing but the stump, and the two men's dialogue is reduced for him to " majestic, meaningless rumbles ". The space of the room is closed off for him, remaining a space of invisibility but also of brutality, where " the violence of the words, their vehemence " incomprehensible bursts forth. The scene aborts for lack of a breach in the fourth wall of the intimate chamber.

In this very room, described as " sanctuary ", the otherness of the dialogue is compromised³³. Not only are the inaudible words perceived as nothing more than noise, but " I couldn't quite distinguish the father's voice from Count Henri's, so much did they sound alike in those moments ". The father's voice becomes alien, melting into that of his fascinating but disquieting friend. He is absorbed, melted into him. Robbe-Grillet then cuts to the chase: he can't remember why he couldn't enter the room. " Let's not insist on the Freudian chausse-trape that this oversight conceals " (p. 32). Doesn't he invite us, in this way, to identify the very chamber of the father's secrets with a Freudian trapdoor, and to see in the vehement and invisible exchange between father and friend, in this brutal love duel that reedits in an entirely different register that of the captain in Jacques le Fataliste and his friend, the original scene from which all subsequent sadistic scenarii will proceed ? The child, in fact, for want of seeing, clutches his " rag doll, submissive and limp ". The crushing of the doll mimics what for him is played out in the room to which he cannot gain access, the sublime and sadistic crushing of the father under the solar figure of the cavalier Count Henri, whose burning stump supplants the absent image, the subtracted figure.

All subsequent episodes will attempt in vain to " harvest " the damage done by the original brutality that manifested itself in this original scene, a non-scene since walled-in, where the agonizing space of invisibility from which all narrative matrix proceeds was constituted.

The sadistic scenario is a scenario of avoidance of the face-to-face encounter with the female sex, i.e., it consecrates the missed breakthrough in the primitive scene, the passage that didn't take place from the gaze to the intimate brutality of the scene. This missed transgression feeds sadistic perversion, but also constitutes the narrative device. Robbe-Grillet thus puts his perversion at the service of the new semiological paradigm: he makes the fantasy of Angélique crushed, disemboweled, coincide with the reversal of the hole into a pan: the failure of the signifier in the order of discourse (the hole) is turned over into the iconic surface of torment, a horrible, impossible surface for which all narrative is henceforth, on it, no more than embroidery and varnish.

Notes