Questions, Resources, and General Banter - The Erasers

[Jim]

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first published novel was The Erasers, written and released in French in 1953 as Les Gommes. Underappreciated by French Critics, Robbe-Grillet wrote a series of essays which were collected into a book Pour Un Nouveau Roman (For a New Novel) in 1963.


Wikipedia page for Alain Robbe-Grillet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Ro...


Wikipedia page for Pour Un Nouveau Roman:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pour_un_...


Paris Review interview from 1986 :

http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...


Feel free to use this thread to ask questions and post links to resources for Alain Robbe-Grillet and The Erasers.

Also, if you’ve written a review of the book, please post a link to share with the group.

[Dee]

I really hope I get the chance to read this with you. I picked up a copy of the novel in French from a second hand bookshop a couple of months ago, before I realised the group would be reading it, but haven't got round to reading it yet. Whether I find the time to do so over the next few weeks remains to be seen.

[Mekki]

I got a copy from my local library. So far its a quick read.

Interestingly enough, this was already on my TBR under Postmodern mystery.

[Mekki]

This Alain Robbe-Grillet quote: "The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it. " reminds me of the Vladimir Nabokov quote" ‘I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction..."

[Jim]

Mekki wrote: "This Alain Robbe-Grillet quote: "The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it. " reminds me of the Vladimir Nabokov quote" ‘I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic f..."

There is some consonance there. Are you enjoying the book so far?

[Mekki]

Jim wrote: "Mekki wrote: "This Alain Robbe-Grillet quote: "The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it. " reminds me of the Vladimir Nabokov quote" ‘I am neither a reader nor a writer..."

yes, the novel is very interesting so far. The detailed and repeating structure of the novel is new, i can't wait to see where robbe-grillet goes with it.

[Mala]

This is all I could manage:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

[Jim]

Mala wrote: "This is all I could manage:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/..."

Nice. Definitely not a typical detective story.

[Gregsamsa]

I have not read the book but the summary and discussions have intrigued me. Years ago I tried one of his novels where he attempted that absolute objectivity (where sizes and distances are all painstakingly quantified) and found it a bit too tedious. From what I can tell by what you guys have said, this one isn't so much like that. Is this a book you'd recommend?

[Jim]

Gregsamsa wrote: "I have not read the book but the summary and discussions have intrigued me. Years ago I tried one of his novels where he attempted that absolute objectivity (where sizes and distances are all pain..."

At first, you might find it frustrating as layer after layer of "facts" obscure our expectations for a detective story, but then, that may be the point...

I just finished this morning and enjoyed the book.

[Mala]

The Paris Review interviews are always a delight to read– they give such an intimate feel & one gets to learn so much from them but the Alain Robbe-Grillet interview is a must read for an additional reason–It shows how subjective our reading can be! Here we find well-known writers,critics making polar opposite judgements on the same writer/their works. Hard to know,which side to believe!
Here's another interesting article on AR-G :
"Mr. Robbe-Grillet and the other so-called New Novelists, including Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon, wanted to do in literature what others had done in art — just as Marcel Duchamp had deconstructed human motion in “Nude Descending a Staircase” and the Abstract Expressionists had valorized gesture, the movement of a brush stroke itself, over representation. Mr. Robbe-Grillet believed that writing should reveal the archaeology of its own construction, should depict a mind unfolding its thoughts over time."

Remembering Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French Writer and Intellectual - New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/wee...

[Jim]

Relocated from the week three discussion:

Mala Wrote:

Jim,the Oedipal theme is central to the reading of this book– I read up on it– take a look:


"The problem then remains of devising ways of implementing this rejection of tragedy or of myth in general –in one’s fictional works. Robbe-Grillet’s preferred method is to allow traces of myth into his work but to treat them ironically in such away as to trivialize them. Perhaps the clearest and most complete example of this technique is to be found in The Erasers (published as Les Gommes in 1953).In this novel, Robbe-Grillet transposed elements from the legend of Oedipus to a modern detective story. Every one of its elements, beginning with the epigraph–

“Time, which watches everything, has provided the solution in spite of you” –
relates to Sophocles’ play,Oedipus the King.
The literary critic Bruce Morrissette has gone so far as to claim that that parallels between the Greek tragedy and Robbe-Grillet’s “new novel” are as pervasive and as conscious as the cross-references created by James Joyce in Ulysses.Parallels to the plot of Oedipus the King include:

1.Special agent Wallas is sent by Central Intelligence to investigate the assassination of Professor Dupont.
2.Wallas decides that the murderer will return to the scene of his crime
(Professor Dupont’s study).
3.Professor Dupont -- not dead, after all, but in hiding–returns to his study.
4.Wallas arrives at the study and kills him.
5. Several details suggest that Dupont is Wallas’s father.

As Bruce Morrissette points out, many minor details of the novel also allude to
Oedipus the King:
1.Various versions of the Sphinx’s riddle appear, including “blind in the
morning, incestuous at noon, and parricide in the evening”
2.The Sphinx itself appears in the form of debris floating on a canal: “a fabulous animal with a lion’s body and its great tail and eagle’s wings”
3.A post office is described in such a way as to recall Apollo’s temple at Delphi.

4.The pencil eraser for which Wallas is searching contains a name of which he
can recall only the two central letters “DI” (from “Oedipe” in French).
5.At the end of his journey, Wallas has swollen feet from having walked too much.

The critic Leon Roudiez has said that the “gomme” is intended to erase the theme of
Oedipus from the novel in such a way as to show that myth is no longer relevant to modern man. Clearly, Robbe-Grillet has deprived the myth of Oedipus of any explanatory power.He implies that the myth itself is not rooted in nature; rather, it is a product of human history. In this way, he resembles writers like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett whose ironic use of myth–in Ulysses and Waiting for Godot , for example– deprives human life of its anchorage in a providential design."

Here's the link:

New Novel/New Criticism: Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes | tom cousineau - Academia.edu
http://www.academia.edu/3984447/New_N...

A heavy duty look:

"Les Gommes (1953), the first published novel of this writer, like all his works, may be read on various levels. As in a palimpsest, each uncovered layer reveals a new significance while traces of the others remain, adding both depth and distortion. Les Gommes, because it is the most obviously mythological in content of Robbe-Grillet's work, is the most interesting to study in the context of myth. More specifically, the story of Oedipus in both the historical and Jungian senses takes on a different perspective when viewed in the new network of sense created by the author.
Robbe-Grillet's use of the Oedipus myth in Les Gommes is not a convenient préfiguration which provides for the reader a simple parallel to guide him through the labyrinthine paths created by fragmented time or the lack of an omniscient narrator. Similarly, Robbe-Grillet's use of key referents in the Oedipus myth is not entirely innocent. When, for example, the drunkard accosts the protagonist Wallas with the first of his riddles, the reader, who has already been alerted to the presence of the Oedipus myth in the text, recognizes the figure of the sphinx. The first riddle,
however, is not of the type we normally associate with that beast: "What is the
difference between a railway-line and a bottle of white wine?" Robbe-Grillet has carefully baited the trap for the reader and now springs it, since the answer the drunkard offers is bathetic:

— The difference? The drunkard seems completely blank this time. The difference between what?
— Why, between the railway-line and the bottle!
— Ah yes...the bottle...says the other chap softly, as if he were coming back from
far away. The difference...Why, it's enormous...The railway-line!...It's not the same thing at all...(p. 119)

To adopt the language of Derrida, the concept of the sphinx in Les Gommes is "under erasure." Thus while inviting the reader to see the correspondence, Robbe-Grillet indicates simultaneously that the correspondence is not to be seen. The title of the novel, Les Gommes, in addition to pointing to a Proustian-like reminiscence of a
childhood he seems never to have experienced, also indicates the rubbing out of past
errors. J. S. Wood has pointed out that the kind of eraser Wallas is looking for is known in French as gomme-savon, or "soap-eraser." In the context therefore of washing clean or erasing past faults, Wallas's search for that particular kind of eraser could be interpreted morally. Wallas, if he is Oedipus, has a sinful past to erase, but if he is not Oedipus, there is no reason to attribute such a meaning to the eraser. Another, more suggestive, possibility centers on the letters di which Wallas remembers seeing on an eraser of the type he is looking for. While they are obviously the central two letters di, Oedipe, when reversed they form id, the unconscious part of Wallas's character upon which he is unable to focus. Wallas's search for the murderer turns out to be a search for himself, an interpretation confirmed on the level of plot when he unintentionally murders the victim of the supposed original murder which never took place—a victim who, it is suggested, could be his father.

This presence/absence of the Oedipus myth serves to structure Les Gommes in a dynamic manner. The framework of Les Gommes—Prologue, five chapters, Epilogue—is an obvious analogue of Greek tragedy. Yet the framework is empty since the progression of dramatic action in traditional statements of the myth follows a chronological order, whereas in Les Gommes it is precisely the confusion of chronological order which is presented. The framework of classical tragedy, like the Oedipus myth itself (to the extent that one can speak of myth separate from its principal embodiment), operates in ironic opposition to the story of Wallas, because, as a prime example of predestined action, it is static; Oedipus's future is already contained in his past, and is thus closed. Wallas's future, on the other hand, is open and closed. If ultimately he kills the person whose murder he is supposed to be investigating, it is by accident that it happens, a consequence not of predestination but of the combination of freedom and situation. Convolution of plot and theme, where beginning and ending are the same, where like a Klein bottle in which interior and exterior surfaces are confused, this plot in double helix fashion winds upon itself to erase both beginning and ending. Wallas's situation is presented dramatically:
. .. as he walks he gradually unrolls the uninterrupted line of his own passing, not a series of illogical, unrelated images, but a smooth tape into which each element is immediately inserted, even the most fortuitous ones, even those which may at first appear absurd, or threatening, or anachronistic, or illusory; all of them place themselves one next to the other, and the fabric lengthens, without a gap or an overlap, at the steady speed of his step. For it really is he who moves forward; this movement belongs to his body, not to the backdrop that some stagehand is to wind past; Wallas can follow in his limbs the way his joints work, the alternating contractions of his muscles, and he is the one who governs the rhythm and the length of his stride, (p. 52).

Here's the link: Mythic Structures in Alain Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes, A. R. CHADWICK and VIRGINIA HARGER-GRINLING, Memorial University of Newfoundland

http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/...