In the Labirynth

In the Labyrinth is the third published book of the French novelist and film maker Alain Robbe-Grillet. It belongs to a group of works that have been named New Novel ,for their proposition of new forms of narrative that take into consideration the relationship between contemporary man and the world surrounding him. The way in which the question is addressed makes the work particularly interesting for architects, for it elects embodied perception as the primary vehicle of communication between subject and object, transforming the narrative in an exploration in which the act of reading becomes very similar to an experience of architecture. The process implies a deconstruction of rationalistic assumptions such as the homogeneity of space and time and the limits between the real and the imaginary, substituting the commonly accepted definition of the world for an experience of it. As a consequence, it becomes more demanding for the reader, who will not be offered with a complete, �ready-made� story, but with fragmented pieces that will depend entirely on his recreation to acquire meaning. This is the reason why the reader of this paper should not expect to receive a linear and logical account of the narrative, but should satisfy him or herself with small extracts that will serve as illustrations for the text.

Robbe-Grillet defines the New Novel as an exploration, interested only in defining man�s situation in the world. It implies a search for " new forms �, which are capable of expressing (or creating) new relations between man and the world�" He explains that the forms used by novelists in the past were proper to transcribe a particular experience and view of the world. They reflect a way of seeing the object / subject relationship, which is precisely what the new novelists are questioning. On the other hand, a completely new novel is impossible, for we are a product of the past, our culture and our tradition are responsible for what we are. This does not mean that we are to keep following their formulas, neither that we have to create new ones. Instead, what Robbe-Grillet proposes is a continuous experimentation, "each novelist, each novel must invent its own form. No recipes can replace this continual reflection."

Reflection for Robbe-Grillet implies criticism. He believes that criticism, instead of "sterilizing (the artist�s) creative power, will on the contrary supply him with motive power." He often says he does not transcribe, but constructs. After the loss of a common ground of meaning, reality can no longer be imitated. The contemporary artists or novelist have to re-create, to construct a new reality, thus criticism is implied in the act of creation.

The traditional Novel has always been considered a temporal art, based on the consecutiveness of time. As a consequence, narratives used to be linear transcriptions of events, that would sum up at the end constituting what we know as a story. Modern literature has criticized this tradition by experimenting with the breaking up of linearity, sometimes even leaving stories unfinished. Robbe-Grillet pushes these changes even further, challenging the concept of story in its traditional sense. He claims that stories cannot be told as they used to, for �ready-made� stories with beginning and end belong to an era where the world was �stable, clear and innocent�. The world does not present itself to us as a complete and whole reality, but as fragments of realities that depend on our re-creation in order to mean something. Thus what he gives us are fragments of a story, or scattered events that could be joined to form one. Yet he refuses joining the pieces, teaching us that our life and our experience of the world cannot be reduced to an explanation, but have to be worked out, re-created in order to acquire meaning

In the same way, the idea of character as an allegorical subject, or subjects, with a background and a psychological signification, that usually we are able to identify with ourselves or with someone we know, is abandoned. Robbe-Grillet explains that they belong to an age that marked �the apogee of the individual�, where man was the center of the world and reality existed for him. He criticizes it, arguing that "on the pretext that man can a achieve only a subjective knowledge of the world, humanism decides to elect man the justification of everything," so things, instead of being perceived for what they are, acquire an anthropomorphic character, being transformed in something that exists for man. He sees it as a form of denying our human condition, an attempt to make our existence less problematic by transforming the world in a �safe� place.

Hence he challenges this conventional notion of character. Sometimes he presents us with individuals who have no past, no psychological identity and very often no name. Flat characters, like the soldier in In the Labyrinth. At other times, the world becomes the character and he can write for pages and pages just describing objects and their situation, making us realize that although objectified, the world is still our primary source of meaning.

"I am alone here now, under cover. Outside it is raining, outside you walk through the rain with your head down, shielding your eyes with one hand while you stare ahead nevertheless, a few yards ahead, at a few yards of wet asphalt; outside is cold, the wind blows between the bare black branches; the wind blows through the leaves, rocking whole boughs, rocking them, rocking, their shadows swaying across the white roughcast walls. Outside the sun is shining, there is no tree, no bush to cast a shadow, and you walk under the sun shielding your eyes with one hand while you stare ahead, only a few yards in front of you, at a few yards of dusty asphalt where the wind makes patterns of parallel lines, forks, and spirals."

"The sun does not get in here, nor the wind, nor the rain, nor the dust. The fine dust which dulls the gloss of the horizontal surfaces, the varnished wood of the table, the waxed floor, the marble shelf over the fireplace, the marble top of the chest, the cracked marble on top of the chest, the only dust comes from the room itself: from the cracks in the floor maybe, or else from the bed, or from the curtains or from the ashes in the fireplace."

"On the polished wood of the table, the dust has marked the places occupied for a while - for a few hours, several days, minutes, weeks - by small objects subsequently removed whose outlines are still distinct for some time, a circle, a square, a rectangle, other less simple shapes, some partly overlapping, already blurred or half obliterated as though by a rag."

The first element that calls one�s attention is the author�s extensive use of description. As opposed to traditional literature, in which descriptions were subordinated to the narrative, having a decorative or symbolic function , Robbe-Grillet uses them as narrative forms, transforming them in the very essence of the text. They have to be understood as a consequence of the New Novel�s aim of exploring man�s relationship with the world, as a way of transforming the experience of reading in an �experience of life�. "Since it is chiefly in its presence that the world�s reality resides, our task is to create a literature which takes that presence into account."

These descriptions are restricted to geometrical forms and surfaces, "rejecting any complicity", following the author�s proposition to take reality for what it is, external and independent from man. "Objects do not represent or mean anything, they simply exist - they are. They have nothing under their surface - they are what we see." The sense of sight becomes an important one, for it rejects complicity and sets a distance between the object and observer. The author considers this distance necessary in order to surpass the traditional �coincidence� with the object, where the last is understood through an �identification� with the subject. "To describe things is to deliberately place oneself outside them."

This distance and objectivity have caused Robbe-Grillet�s novels to be classified as �objective literature� , a definition that he refutes, arguing that the New Novel aims only at a total subjectivity. He declares that behind all these objective descriptions, there is always a narrator. Although formally absent, this narrator is always present behind his distorted and confusing descriptions. "Not only it is a man who � describes everything, but it is the least neutral, the least impartial of men: always engaged, on the contrary, in an emotional adventure of the most obsessive kind, to the point of often distorting his vision and of producing imaginings close to delirium."

What Robbe-Grillet is proposing is to reestablish the communication between man and the world through the use of perceptive experience. It is "a subjective approach to objectivity" , in which the objective reality exists independent of man, but is constantly modifying him and being modified by him. Because perception is a personal experience, involving the individual�s past experiences, as well as his present situation and mood, the narrator�s attempt to describe an objectified reality in the most impersonal way is always betrayed by his own perceptions, ending up in a description that is everything but neutral. As Robbe-Grillet says, the world he knows is the one as seen by his own point of view, "it shall never know any other" .

"Outside it is snowing. Outside it has been snowing, it was snowing, outside it is snowing. The thick flakes descend gently in a steady, uninterrupted, vertical fall - there is not a breath of air - in front of the high gray walls whose arrangement, the alignment of the roofs, the location of the doors and windows, cannot be distinguished clearly because of the snow. There must be identical rows of regular windows on each floor from one end of the straight street to the other."

"A perpendicular crossroads reveals a second street just like the first: the same absence of traffic, the same high gray walls, the same blind windows, the same deserted sidewalks. At the corner of the sidewalk, a street light is on, although it is broad daylight. But it is a dull day which makes everything colorless and flat. Instead of the striking vistas these row of houses should produce, there is only a crisscrossing of meaningless lines, the falling snow depriving the scene of all relief, as if this blurred view were merely badly painted on a bare wall."

Another important point to be noted is the constant present tense of the narrative. The above extract exemplifies that whenever the narrator uses a past tense, he immediately corrects it, bringing it to the present. Recalling the beginning of the narrative, where the narrator first appears, he seems to have come for a very specific reason, which is making the reader aware of his specific situation in space and time. I am alone here now. From beginning to end, everything happens in the present, opposing the usual past tense of French literature in another instance of literary form modification in the search of new means of expression.

Robbe-Grillet knows that perceptive experience can only happen when space and time are reconciled with the body�s presence. As Merleau-Ponty says, we belong to time and space, our body inhabits time and space, thus perception can only happen in the here and now, that is in presence and in the present.

The time Robbe-Grillet refers to is not the chronological time of science, neither the cosmological time of the universe, but a human time, the time of experience as lived, the time generated by the body�s interaction with the world, which is always a present time. On the other hand, our present experience is always influenced by past ones and are always a projection of future ones. Thus the present on Robbe-Grillet�s novels is always a �thick� one, a collapse of past, present and future in one single time, the time of the body�s presence. Past and future exist only in relation to the present, and are both manifest in it.

In the same way, spatiality in Robbe-Grillet�s novels is a spatiality of situation. The element that defines it is also the body, for only in relation to the last can the former be understood. This is important for it conceives space as inhabited space, space as it is experienced. Science tells us that space is a homogeneous, pre-existent three dimensional entity, whose existence is independent of us. Robbe-Grillet, in privileging perceptive experience, demonstrates that space can only come into existence after experienced by the body. It is the body that defines space as the result of an interaction. The world exist and is there before any contact with me , but space can only come into existence after my body interacts with its surrounding objects.

This explains Robbe-Grillet�s excessive care in describing material reality. He is not trying to be objective, but is showing that spatiality depends on situation and that the only way to experience it is in the present. His objects are never positioned in homogeneous space and time, instead they are always described in relation to one another, and as the narrator sees them. Meaning appears not from an isolated object, but in its relationship to the surrounding reality. A good example is the constant shifts of scenes, specially between interior and exterior space. Although the narrator never has to cross a door, or even a window to accomplish the shift, the last only becomes possible through a relationship to the object, scene of gesture described immediately before.

"But the bottom of the overcoat has swept away several of these tiny agglomerations, just as the boots, changing position several times, have trampled the snow in their immediate vicinity, leaving in places yellower areas, hardened, half-raised pieces and the deep marks of the hobnails arranged in alternate rows. In front of the chest, the felt slippers have cleared a large gleaming area in the dust, and another one in front of the table at the place that must be occupied by a desk chair or an armchair, a stool; or some kind of seat. A narrow path of gleaming floor has been made from one to the other; a second path goes from the table to the bed. Parallel to the housefronts, a little closer to the walls than to the gutter, a yellowish-gray straight path also indicates the snow-covered sidewalk. Produced by the footsteps of people now gone, the path passes between the lighted street light and the door of the last apartment house, then turns at right angles and disappears in the perpendicular cross street, still following the line of the housefronts about a third of the way across the sidewalk, from one end of its length to the other."

"Another path then leads from the bed to the chest. From here, the narrow strip of gleaming floor which leads from the chest to the table, joining the two large areas cleared of dust, swerves slightly in order to pass closer to the fireplace whose grate contains a heap of ashes, without and-irons. The black marble of the mantlepiece, like everything else, is covered with gray dust. But the layer is not so thick as on the table or on the floor, and it is uniform on the entire surface of the shelf; now no object encumbers the shelf, and only one has left its outlines, clear and black, in the exact center of the rectangle. This is the same four branched cross: one branch elongated and pointed, one shorter and oval, the continuation of the first, and two small flaring appendages set perpendicularly on each side."

This knitting of things and scenes to one another, is what permits the narrator to make sense of the reality surrounding him, to transform his apparently lonely existence into a meaningful one. In isolation objects do not mean anything, but when they are put together, anything can happen�

"The picture, in its varnished wooden frame, represents a tavern scene. It is a nineteenth-century etching, or a good reproduction of one. A large number of people fill the room, a crowd of drinkers sitting or standing, and, on the far left, the bartender standing on a slightly raised platform behind his bar."

He takes us through the whole scene, describing each group of people, passing by a child sitting on the floor looking straight ahead. "He is sitting with his legs folded under him, his arms clasped around a box, something like a shoe box." He continues his description and finds a table, somehow isolated from the rest, where three soldiers are sit, two in profile and one facing the outside of the picture. He looks to see if there is anything behind them, but the drawing is vaguer, so he starts moving outside the picture. In making this move, he notices that "under the print, in the white margin, someone has written the tittle: "The Defeat of Reichenfels.""

This is enough to draw his attention back to the drawing, more precisely to the table where the soldiers are sitting. "On closer examination, the isolation of the three soldiers seems to result less from the narrow space between them and the crowd than from the direction of the glances around them�" Hence he starts describing the soldiers in more detail, concentrating in the one in the middle. He does that for over two pages, until...

"Particularly the soldier shown full face has been portrayed with a wealth of detail that seems quiet out of proportion to the indifference it expresses. No specific thought can be discerned. It is merely a tired face, rather thin, and narrowed still further by several days� growth of beard. This thinness, these shadows, that accentuate the features without, on the other hand, indicating the slightest individual characteristic, nevertheless emphasize the brilliance of the wide-open eyes."

"The military overcoat is buttoned up to the neck, where the regimental number is embroidered on a diamond-shaped tab of material. The cap is set straight on the head, covering the hair, which is cut extremely short, judging from its appearance at the temples. The man is sitting stiffly, his hands lying flat on the table which is covered with a red-and-white checked oilcloth."

"He has finished his drink some time ago. He does not look as if he were thinking of leaving. Yet, around him, the café has emptied. The light is dim now, the bartender having turned out most of the lamps before leaving the room himself."

Amazingly, the picture becomes alive, starting a series of non-linear and non-chronological events which will eventually, with the reader�s help, become a story. It tells of a soldier (the one just described), lost in a city he does not know (which happens to be the same city the narrator described in the beginning of the narrative), with a box in the shape of a shoe box under his arm (coincidentally described before in the boy�s arms and over the chest in the narrator�s room), which he has to deliver to someone he does not know, in a street corner which he can not remember the name. Despite all incertitudes, the soldier is always in hurry, anxious to deliver the package, whose content he refuses to reveal to the few people he happens to meet. Eventually, his anxiousness becomes an obsession, which not even a high fever, and later on a deadly wound keep him from his desperate need of accomplishing his mission.

With the increasing rhythm of the narrative, his obsession becomes ours, and we are trapped into the narrative, which becomes each time more confusing among the affirmations and negations of the narrator. The descriptions he gives, although always from the same spaces, never coincide. Every time the narrator comes back to a place, there is always a missing object or another one being introduced, while the rest has been shifted around. In the same way he repeats whole scenes, each time in a different way, usually contradicting the previous one. It is as if the narrator was desperately trying to make sense of the narrative for himself, while at the same time trying to make explicit the fictitious character of the story. Robbe-Grillet�s intention is to show how fragile and pre-conceived are the limits between the real and the imaginary. What is written is fictitious, but it is real, or it has its own reality, being sometimes more real than the constructed world surrounding us. It is a product of the author�s imagination, but it is as real as our imagination allows it to be. As the author proclaims: "the objects in our novels never have a presence outside human perception, real or imaginary."

This is what gives the reader the (imposed) liberty of re-creating the story in his own way. Like the narrator, who seems to have �invented� the whole plot from the reality surrounding him, the reader is challenged to create his own version of the narrative, based on the scattered information the narrator gives him. "The author today proclaims his absolute need of the reader�s cooperation, an active, conscious, creative assistance. What he asks of him is no longer to receive ready-made a world completed, full, closed upon itself, but on the contrary to participate in a creation, to invent in his turn the work - and the world - and thus to learn to invent his own life."

The imagination of the author is the base of his work. And precisely because he exercises its possibilities, he is aware of the importance it has, not only for artists and writers, but for any human being. When he imposes on the reader a participation in the creative process, he is not trying to get rid of the responsibility he has as an author, but rather using his responsibility to influence others, teaching them not to accept ready-made solutions that may seem easier, but to pay attention to the lessons acquired through experience, learning to transform them into knowledge of themselves and of their own existence.

"In dreams and in memory, as in looking, our imagination is the organizing force in our life, in our world. Each man, at his own turn, has to re-invent things around him. This things are the true things, plain, hard and shinny of the real world. They do not refer to any other world. They are not the sign of anything other than themselves. And the only contact man can maintain with them is through imagining them."

Through the use of new forms of narrative, Robbe-Grillet makes us feel the spaces and scenes he describes. He manages to transform our reading in an experience very similar to the one of experiencing architecture, although sometimes the spaces he proposes seem more interesting than the ones of our daily life. The reason resides precisely in the way they are constructed. They challenge us to question our pre-conceived definitions of the world in which our experience is substituted by a scientific assumption, and where meaning cannot be found.

The experience of the book demonstrates that the world is still our primary source of knowledge and meaning. It shows that the only way to access it is through a dialectical, embodied experience, in which our body becomes the only possible vehicle of communication between the world and our perceiving consciousness. Meaning cannot be found entirely in the world, nor in our mind, but in the contact of both. The world informs us and we, in turn, give meaning to it In Robbe-Grillet�s theories, this meaning giving act is always associated with participation and imagination. One can only perceive if one is engaged, thus one can only find meaning in the world through participation. At the same time, in a world where objects, as he says, are seen as tools, deprived of any meaning, our imagination becomes essential for our existence, the only way to �dwell�, in Heidegger�s sense - dwell through building, finding meaning in our own existence.

References:

Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, translated by Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1965).

Alain Robbe-Grillet, In the Labyrinth, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1978).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1995).