Discussion - Week Three - The Erasers - Chapter Four & Five; Epilogue

[Jim]

Glenn wrote: Another Robbe-Grillet quote I enjoy very much comes from ‘Ghosts in the Mirror’, his Romanesque/autobiography: "Characters in novels or films are also kinds of phantoms: you see them or hear them, you can never grasp them, if you try you pass right through them. Their existence is suspect, insistent, like that of the unquiet dead forced by some evil spell or divine vengeance to live the same scenes from their tragic destiny over and over again. . . . as if they were desperately trying to gain access to a fleshly existence that is denied them . . . attempting to drag the other, all the others, including the innocent reader, into their impossible quest." What a way to view the men and women we encounter in the pages of novels! - as victims of a spell, forced to live their flesh-less lives over and over again...."

I think we'll find these ideas probed even further in The Invention of Morel.