_{‘Seeking a term to describe the innovation in narrative viewpoint invented by Robbe-Grillet in La Jalousie, I called the new mode that of the “je-néant,” or absent-I. … [T]he je-néant may be defined as a technique of the suppressed first person in which all pronouns or forms associated with it (such as I, me, mine, and the like) are eliminated. A central focus of vision is created, in a style related to that of the cinematic subjective camera, but lacking the first person commentary on the sound track which typically accompanies the subjective sequences of films made in this mode, such as Lady in the Lake. A hole (Robbe-Grillet calls it a “creux”) is created at the core of the narrative, and the reader installs himself therein, assuming the narrator’s vision and performing, without verbal clues, all the unspoken and implicit interpretation of scenes and events that, in the conventional novel of psychological analysis and commentary, would normally be spelled out by the author or his character.’}

_{— Bruce Morrissette, “The Evolution of Narrative Viewpoint in Robbe-Grillet” (1967, p. 28)}

 

La porte se ferme avec netteté.

Au rez-de-chaussée, la maison a un air de repos.

L’escalier est à gauche, montant au premier étage.

Une lumière faible, oblique perce les jalousies.  Elle atteint à peine la balustrade.

Au coin du palier, la pendule sonne les huit heures.

Au premier étage, une porte ouverte fait face à l’escalier.  La chambre n’est pas tout à fait bien rangée.

À droite, il y a une armoire au bout du couloir.

À l’autre bout du couloir, une porte-fenêtre donne sur le balcon.

C’est une chambre masculine, avec des vêtements d’homme éparpillé çà et là.  On dirait que c’est la chambre du maître.

Il est un homme d’habitudes négligées.

Sur la coiffeuse, il y a un mouchoir d’étoffe fine, féminine.

Le monogramme d’A… est brodé au coin.

Il y a une deuxième chambre à côté de la porte-fenêtre, à la gauche.  La porte est entrouverte.  Celle donnant sur le balcon aussi.

En face de la deuxième chambre, une porte fermée.

Fermée, mais non à clef.

De l’eau coule du robinet.

Elle coule librement dans le lavabo, cascadant sur un gant de toilette.

Reflété au miroir, on voie des trous, des fissures dans la porte de verre de la douche.

Ce sont des trous et des fissures faits par des balles de petit calibre.  Ils descendent du haut de la porte en bas.

Dedans, les trous dans le carrelage correspondent à ceux de la porte.  Ils descendent également de haut en bas.

Le maître se penche dans le coin de la douche, du sang à la tempe.

—Dean Kyte, “The Absent Eye”

We kick off 2024 on The Melbourne Flâneur with a continuation of my ongoing deep dive into the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, taking a flânerie through the eminent Academician’s third and probably most famous novel, La Jalousie (Jealousy, 1957).

It’s the quintessential Robbe-Grillet novel, and probably the most perfect expression of his theoretic ideal for the nouveau roman as an absolute escape from anthropocentrism.

It’s also a transitional work, in some sense: whereas in Robbe-Grillet’s first two published novels, Les Gommes (1953) and Le Voyeur (1955), he self-consciously appropriates the polar and adapts the generic tropes of noir to provide a convenient scaffolding that will structure his ludic experiments with literary form in those novels, in La Jalousie Robbe-Grillet transitions away from the ‘training wheels’ of the crime genre to a more classically ‘literary’ situation, which is, in a nutshell, is the classic literary plot: the romantic triangle, a case of suspected infidelity.

In Les Gommes, Robbe-Grillet’s detective story-style ‘game’ involved the mapping of a small, nameless regional city over the course of 24 hours. In Le Voyeur, the game of Cluedo involved the mapping of a small island. In La Jalousie, Robbe-Grillet narrows the terrain of the game still further: the challenge he sets us, as readers, is to draw a map in our minds of a small house and its environs over a brief but indefinable period of time while never venturing beyond the confines of the house.

The house stands in the midst of a small banana plantation in a French colony. It’s square and backs onto a valley with a small river and a wooden bridge over the river that is currently under repair. In front of the house there is a wide gravel drive. A veranda runs around three sides of the house, including the rear, providing a nice, shady spot for evening drinks which overlooks the plantation, the river and the bridge. There are windows on all sides of the house, and these windows are shaded from the tropical sun by the type of slatted wooden shutters that the French call ‘jalousies’.

The cast of characters is similarly constrained. Though there are some native workmen who spend most of their days crouching by the river and contemplating how they’re going to repair the bridge, and ‘le boy’, a smiling young lad always ready to dispose the chairs on the back veranda and lay out the fixings for the cocktail hour, we are mostly concerned with two characters, A…, the mistress of the house, and Franck, a neighbour.

A… seems to be the premonition of Delphine Seyrig in L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961); at least, that’s how I imagine her in terms of looks and style and affect based on Robbe-Grillet’s obsessive description, and I think it’s probable that he was also imagining someone like the future A of Marienbad.

A…’s not quite as ethereal as the later A, but, as a framed photograph on a desk in the office indicates, she belongs more on a café terrace in Europe than on a banana plantation in the colonies. She’s a ‘light’ person, graceful but superficial.

Franck, on the other hand, is heavy, virile, masculine. He’s master of a neighbouring plantation but seems to find every opportunity to leave his sickly wife and child at home to come visit with A… round about the drinks hour, inviting himself to dinner. They frequently discuss a ‘roman africain’ that Franck has read and that A… is currently reading, and into which neither shows any particular literary insight.

They clearly have a good rapport. These are two healthy, vivacious people who would be attractive to each other in any circumstances. In these circumstances, as two French colonists cut off from ‘civilization’, they find themselves somewhat ‘thrown together’.

The port city, their nearest source of supplies and news, is several hours’ drive away over bad roads. Somehow they contrive to go into town together, Franck to investigate the purchase of a new truck, A… to do some undisclosed shopping. If they leave before dawn, they should be back at the house after dark on the same day.

Somehow they manage to get back the following morning.

I think it is still possible to read La Jalousie in a vestigial noir context. With its steamy tropical plantation setting, there is a similarly ‘roman noir manqué’ quality to La Jalousie as there is to Somerset Maugham’s The Letter—at least as it is interpreted in the plausibly noirish 1940 melodrama starring Bette Davis, with its memorable opening—reminiscent, as I shall argue, of the ‘cinematic’ conceit of Robbe-Grillet’s writing in this novel—leading to la Davis getting her gun off.

A letter is also a significant piece of documentary evidence circumstantially pointing towards adultery in La Jalousie, and in her article “The Parody of Influence: The Heart of the Matter in Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie” (1991), Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston makes a persuasive case for Graham Greene’s 1948 colonial novel of romantic intrigue as the much-dissected ‘roman africain’, the mutual enjoyment of which is another piece of damning evidence in the case against the supposed lovers of La Jalousie.

Very similar to the tracking, booming crane shot which opens The Letter, Bruce Morrissette, in the quotation heading up my ficción, explicitly compares Robbe-Grillet’s literary approach in La Jalousie to the ‘objectively subjective’ cinematic approach that Robert Montgomery takes to his adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake (1943).

But to my mind, La Jalousie is closer to James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1943)—if that story had been told from the perspective of the husband. And of course Cain, the godfather of the lurid love triangle plot, considered himself to be a ‘literary novelist’, not a jobbing member of the hardboiled school of crime fiction.

The state of jealousy—an abstract condition which can be rendered geometrically, as a triangular form—is one of the basic noir situations, and in this novel without guns, without crimes—almost without incidents—where the only violence is displaced onto a centipede, Robbe-Grillet achieves his end, an apparently objective description of the state of jealousy, by inviting the reader to hypothetically step into and occupy this state via a literary technique that objectively simulates the subjective camerawork of films noirs like Lady in the Lake and Dark Passage (both 1947).

In La Jalousie, this objective simulation of the subjective camera serves as what Morrissette, in a throwaway line from his article “The Evolution of Narrative Viewpoint in Robbe-Grillet”, describes vaguely as the ‘style Robbe-Grillet’—the presentation, from an unusual, non-human perspective, of the human element against a patterned décor.

According to Morrissette, the typical style Robbe-Grillet involves the arrangement and presentation of ‘objects and other consistent elements’ such as ‘geometrical terms, scientific precisions, deceptive qualifiers’ and so on in a manner that is not ‘specifically adapted to the character’s mentality.’

In La Jalousie, this definition does not hold quite true, for the external, objective topology of a concretized space becomes absolutely consubstantial with an internal, subjective perception of an abstract emotional state: as readers, we are placed in an objective relation to the story-world just as, in the video essay above, the objective movement of the cinematic apparatus through the mise-en-scène of a Hollywood studio set is perceptually consubstantial, from the viewer’s standpoint, with a subjective experience of flânerie through a crime scene.

In La Jalousie, therefore, objective space and subjective state are one.

As Robbe-Grillet assiduously builds up his objective description of aspects of the house as viewed from various angles at various times of day, we gradually become aware that a subjective state which can only be described as ‘jealousy’ is emerging as a property of the objective network of relations.

The house becomes the ‘domain of jealousy’ in which Morrissette’s ‘objects and other consistent elements’ reveal by their arrangement and presentation a subtle vectorial dimension in their connections which is not length, nor breadth, nor depth, nor time, but the suppressed psychological.

Robbe-Grillet achieves this paradoxical effect through a literary style that simulates both the mobile camera’s fluid movement through the conceptual space of the house and an organization of time that is similar to cinematic montage.

In addition to a constrained flâneurial liberty of regard, the assemblage of time in La Jalousie enajmbs discreet moments of objective relation in such a way as to press a certain ‘story’ of A…’s and Franck’s probable adultery to emerge from the apparatus of the narration.

The szyuzhet of La Jalousie does not advance in a linear fashion, but rather by ‘jump cuts’ that move us forward or backward through the fabula: in fine, Robbe-Grillet employs a grammatical equivalent of a montage-like technique whereby the syntactic logic of paragraphs may carry the narration forward in the same location but at a different time, whether in the past or the future of the previous scene, like two shots taken from the same setup that are interrupted by a cut.

It is as though the imaginary subjective camera of the narration has returned to a particular setup at another point in the fabula—and sometimes these ‘match-cuts’ are so precise that the transition between two distinct scenes can occur within a single sentence, such that the only clue that we are in the same place but at a different time is the movement of the sun, or the slight rearrangement of objects in the ‘setup’, or the sudden disappearance of something from the mise-en-scène altogether.

So how exactly does Robbe-Grillet make space into state?

In his pioneering article “Surfaces et structures dans les romans de Robbe-Grillet” (1958), Bruce Morrissette proposed the ‘corrélatif objectif’ or ‘objective correlative’ as Robbe-Grillet’s fundamentally new and original device for making sense of the world without recourse to the anthropomorphic ‘magical thinking’ of the metaphor or symbol.

The objective correlative, Morrissette says, is discovered manifestly on the surface of the thing-in-itself. It is right there in objects and acts that are not in themselves symbolic.

These ‘things-in-themselves’—A… and Franck, their gestures and behaviours, and the mise-en-scène of La Jalousie, the décor of the house—are in fact pre-symbolic, but their editorial combination as built up through Robbe-Grillet’s assiduous description gradually produces an implied response in the reader which is something like that produced by the traditional literary symbol.

I use the word ‘editorial’ specifically, for in La Jalousie, Robbe-Grillet’s narration is not merely ‘edited’ in the literary sense of choosing what to cut out of the book and what to leave in;—indeed, most readers will probably think Robbe-Grillet has cut out all the plot of his novel and left in only redundant description.

Rather, there is a cinematic sense of ‘editing’ in the literary narration, of montage, of ‘assemblage’: Robbe-Grillet ‘mounts’, as in a series of natures mortes, objects, characters and actions in superficial imagistic combinations, and for Morrissette, rather than individual objects-as-symbols, it is these edited combinatorial structures of superficial images that signify an implied meaning.

This is the eminently ‘cinematic’ quality of Robbe-Grillet’s writing I have referred to in a previous post on this vlog: before a thing that is to be filmed acquires any indexical relation to an abstract anthropomorphic conception that might potentially be regarded as ‘symbolic’, it exists as a physical ‘thing-in-itself’—an object, person, act or gesture that is capable of being filmed.

In this view, the actual elements of the story-world—the house and the veranda, A… and Franck, the chairs and their arrangement on the veranda, the number of place settings at the dinner table, the layout of the plantation, the number and arrangement of the workers as they contemplate the problem of the bridge, the shape left by the squashed centipede on the wall, the events of the African novel, the sound of the native song;—all these things pre-exist as material facts any symbolic interpretation of them, but in Morrissette’s view, somehow the accumulation and co-ordination of these things produces an affect of jealousy in the reader.

His basis for this proposition was Robbe-Grillet’s own statement that he was only interested in what I call the ‘là-ness’ or ‘there-ness’ of things, not in their potential symbolic content.

Dans les constructions romanesques futures, gestes et objets seront là avant d’être quelque chose ; et ils seront là après, durs, inaltérables, présents pour toujours et comme se moquant de leur propre sens….

In future novelistic constructions, gestures and things will be there before they are something; and they will continue to be there afterwards, hard, immutable, ever-present and as if mocking their own meaning…

—Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Une voie pour le roman futur”, in Pour un nouveau roman (1963, p. 20 [my translation])

The primary ‘objective correlative’ of La Jalousie—the only object that provides the book with any conventional novelistic ‘incident’ —is the enigmatic mark left on the wall of the dining room by the centipede that Franck gallantly gets up from the table to crush.

Pour voir le détail de cette tache avec netteté, afin d’en distinguer l’origine, il faut s’approcher tout près du mur et se tourner vers la porte de l’office. L’image du mille-pattes écrasé se dessine alors, non pas intégrale, mais composée de fragments assez précis pour ne laisser aucun doute. Plusieurs des articles du corps ou des appendices ont imprimé là leurs contours, sans bavure, et demeurent reproduits avec une fidélité de planche anatomique : une des antennes, deux mandibules recourbées, la tête et le premier anneau, la moitié du second, trois pattes de grande taille. Viennent ensuite des restes plus flous : morceaux de pattes en forme partielle d’un corps convulsé en point d’interrogation.

In order to see the detail of this stain clearly so as to make out its origin, it is necessary to get very close to the wall and turn towards the office door. The image of the crushed centipede then takes shape, not completely but composed of fragments that are precise enough as to leave no doubt. Many of the body’s articulations or extremities have unmistakably imprinted their contours there and remain reproduced with the fidelity of an anatomical plate: one of the antennæ, two hooked mandibles, the head and the first segment, half of the second, three legs of large size. Then follow more vague remains: bits of legs which partially form a body twisted into a question mark.

—Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Jalousie (2012, p. 44, [my translation])

Before it is anything else, the ‘tache’ formed by the crushed centipede against the wall is a pure graphic mark. You will note that even the putative interpretation of the shape of that superficial structure as a question mark comes after the fact of the mark on the wall in itself.

As an ‘objective correlative’ for something suspicious, that dark stain on the white wall which endures throughout the book might imply something ambiguous or unresolved in the centipede’s violent end, but it doesn’t necessarily have to.

As Dominique Penot writes in “Psychology of the Characters in Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie” (1966), in a novel where nothing of overt significance happens, Franck’s crushing of the centipede is mentioned seventeen times, and in one of the repetitions of this incident ‘is even described over five straight pages.’

That the narration editorially chooses to record and return to this incident, just as the editor of a film chooses which sequences, cut from the totality of reality, to mount before our vision as a coherent ‘digest’ of that reality, implies that there is something in the fact of the object which correlates to a certain interpretation we are intended to draw from Franck’s gestures and the permanent ‘stain’ he leaves on the wall of A…’s dining room.

There‘s a common interpretation in the academic literature around La Jalousie expressed by critics such Morrissette and Ben Stoltzfus as to why the narration of the novel returns obsessively to this incident, and while I accept its validity, I don’t personally buy it.

To my mind, looking forward to how Robbe-Grillet will graphically treat the A of Marienbad, the imagistic structure of the scutigera on the surface of the wall as potentially being interpretable as a question mark, literally symbolic of a unanswered question, represents a displaced act of violence against the mistress of the house by Franck.

Whether this ‘displaced act of violence’ against A… is foisted upon him by the narration as a wish-fulfilment, or perhaps as an apprehensive perception of the latent nature of his overly friendly rapport with A…, as a violent desire to possess her, I cannot say.

But, as Penot asserts, the nature of the objective correlative as sensemaking device is such that whenever Robbe-Grillet ‘objectively’ describes something like the crushed centipede on the wall, he intends that we should ‘subjectively’ draw an inference about that thing-in-itself.

As description is his main, circuitous device for advancing the plot in La Jalousie, there’s an obvious necessity for Robbe-Grillet to describe the house, its contents, and its occupants so that we can form an accurate mental picture. But beyond that, the nature of Robbe-Grillet’s game is that a certain ‘slant’ should be placed on the supposedly neutral facts he retails.

The fact of the number of the chairs on the veranda or the place settings at the dining table becomes implicitly significant of a dimension of meaning beyond length, width, depth, or time—one which can only be described as the ‘human‘ dimension of sensemaking.

Thus we cumulatively come to apprehend that the stratum of what is not being said by the narration and is merely implied as a consequence of stated facts has as much bearing on the elided plot of La Jalousie as what is actually being described, and that indeed, it is the suspicious implication of the facts of space that are producing a pervading ‘state’ throughout the house and its environs.

Si le narrateur parvient parfois à distinguer l’ordonnance des bananiers et à les dénombrer avec exactitude, la régularité idéale des alignements géométriques se trouve bientôt gauchie et les chiffres se révèlent purement théorique…. De ce point de vue, La Jalousie apparaît presque comme un anti-Discours de la méthode. … L’échec de l’instrument mathématique ne manifeste pas seulement l’insuffisance d’une technique. Il suggère encore l’insuffisance de la gnoséologie qui la fonde….

If the narrator sometimes manages to determine the layout of the banana trees and count them with exactitude, the ideal regularity of their geometric alignments is soon warped and the figures reveal themselves to be purely theoretical…. From this perspective, La Jalousie appears almost like an anti-Discourse on the Method. … The failure of the mathematical instrument not only reveals the insufficiency of a technique; it suggests, moreover, the insufficiency of the philosophy of mind on which mathematics is based….

— René M. Galand, “La Dimension sociale dans La Jalousie de Robbe-Grillet” (1966, pp. 706-7 [my translation])

Both Morrissette and Stoltzfus note that, with the device of the objective correlative, Robbe-Grillet declines to make the job of reading easy and leisurely for us. It is usually the case in novels, both critics observe, that the author (through his characters), has already done the work of analysis for us: the signal of meaning that is to be drawn from objects in the environment comes to us ‘pre-chewed’, ‘pre-digested’, and that predigested ‘message’ of what we are supposed to think about people, places, and events is regurgitated into our mouths for us to bovinely consume.

Like Robert Montgomery tipping us off at the beginning of Lady in the Lake as to the nature of the game of cinematic Cluedo he’s about to play, telling us: ‘You’ve got to watch them; you’ve got to watch them all the time,’ in La Jalousie Robbe-Grillet, through his technique, makes a similarly strict compact with us as readers. He put us under orders to pay permanent, vigilant attention to the material facts of the house; to do the digestive work of analysis for ourselves; and to build up the unstated ‘story’, the romantic mystery of the exact nature of A…’s and Franck’s relations, from the objective correlative of the house itself.

‘Robbe-Grillet’s artistic technique is an extreme objectification or objectivism which, however, is the subjective world of these two protagonists,’ Stoltzfus writes in “Alain Robbe-Grillet and Surrealism” (1963).

That statement of a paradoxical ‘objective subjectivity’ (or vice versa, if you prefer) in Le Voyeur and La Jalousie is key to understanding the ‘proto-cinematic’ style Robbe-Grillet—the view, from an unusual, non-human perspective, of the world of human affairs as flat, abstract pattern, such as the cinecamera affords us.

As I wrote in my previous post, in Le Voyeur the literary narration as proto-cinematic apparatus tends to stand to one side of—and slightly above—Mathias, looking down upon him even though, as Morrissette states in “Evolution of Narrative Viewpoint in Robbe-Grillet”, it represents a dissociated dual viewpoint couched within Mathias himself.

In La Jalousie, Robbe-Grillet extends the proto-cinematic experiment in narrational viewpoint still further. We no longer walk alongside the tropic noir character as he plays detective in his flânerie about the island, we enter a ‘creux’, a space in the virtual reality of the house as composed by the narrative, a hole in the matrix that Robbe-Grillet has carefully opened up for us to inhabit.

To use a word with both mechanical and spiritual connotations, he creates a vehicle for the reader.

As Morrissette explains, the narrational apparatus of this ‘vehicle’ gives the uncanny effect of the subjective camera in films noirs like Lady in the Lake. As in the video essay above, we tour the house as if on dolly tracks or the rubber wheels of a booming crane, floating, gliding rather than ‘walking’ through it, and taking note of objects and actions in our passage, the words on the page serving much the same purpose, as disinterested commentary, as the deliberately neutral subtitles I’ve appended to a sequence from Montgomery’s film.

Morrissette calls the hollowed-out space of this vehicle the ‘je-néant’ or ‘Absent-I’, and it’s the illusive objectivity that is created by precisely the schizoid, Cartesian suppression of subjectivity that Galand criticizes above;—for as science now knows, we can have no scientific observation without an ‘observer’.

And this is equally the disheartening discovery we make with the most ‘scientific’ of art-forms—the ‘Seventh Art’, which is the triumph of science.

The camera, tool of objective regard like the microscope or telescope, while capable of giving us an unblinking, ‘non-human perspective’ on human affairs, capable, like the camera in Montgomery’s film. of moving with a tracking, gliding gait that is not walking, of booming up the staircase in a way that feels more like floating than climbing, always has an ‘editorial regard’ in back of it.

In my post on Le Voyeur, I said that the proto-cinematic narrational apparatus was ‘aligned and allied to’ Mathias’s perspective, as if moving on a parallel track to his flânerie.

In La Jalousie, we’re behind the camera; we’re in back of the machine; we are the ghost within it. There’s no need for an ‘alliance’ with the narration or an alignment of its perspective to ours because the je-néant is the ‘origin point’ of all lines and angles of regard in the novel.

It’s the presence of an observer that throws an invidious ‘slant’ on any scientific observation, which causes an interpretative inference to be drawn from the material facts of objective relations. That’s precisely the work of analysis, of human sensemaking, and even if we’re looking through a lens, meaning that is relevant to humans, that is understandable by them, has to be ‘demodulated’ from the signal sent by the medium of the camera.

But in La Jalousie, the observational presence that makes meaning from the welter of objective phenomena is negated by the text as a conspicuous absence, and it is the vehicle of the narrational apparatus, the ‘Absent-I’, that inveigles the reader into fulfilling the rôle, just as Montgomery, in Lady in the Lake, invites us to ‘co-star’ with him as Marlowe through the medium of the mobile, subjective camera.

The problem of objectivity and subjectivity that the cinema proposed to solve in modernity and dishearteningly failed to solve hinges on the promise of ‘total sight’ and the fact that the camera, however uncoupled from alliance with and alignment to the human perspective, still has significant ‘blind spots’.

In La Jalousie, the system of louvred shutters over the windows of the house are objective correlatives for this state of partial vision: the slats of les jalousies create a ‘zone blanche’ in A…’s bedroom where she can hide in the corner of the room, beyond the angle of the narrational apparatus’s ‘jealous’ regard.

Elle s’est maintenant réfugiée, encore plus sur la droite, dans l’angle de la pièce, qui constitue aussi l’angle sud-ouest de la maison. Il serait facile de l’observer par l’une des deux portes, celle du couloir central ou celle de la salle des bains ; mais les portes sont en bois plein, sans système de jalousies qui laisse voir au travers. Quant aux jalousies des trois fenêtres, aucune d’elles ne permet plus maintenant de rien appercevoir.

…

Les trois fenêtres sont semblables, divisées chacune en quatre rectangles égaux, c’est-à-dire quatre séries de lames, chaque battant comprenant deux séries dans le sens de la hauteur. Les douze séries sont identiques : seize lames de bois manœuvrées ensemble par une baguette latérale, disposée verticalement contre le montant externe.

Les seize lames d’une même série demeurent constamment parallèles. Quand le système est clos, elles sont appliquées l’une contre l’autre par leurs bords, se recouvrant mutuellement d’environ un centimètre. En poussant la baguette vers le bas, on diminue l’inclinaison des lames, créant ainsi une série de jours dont la largeur s’accroît progressivement.

Lorsque les jalousies sont ouvertes au maximum, les lames sont presque horizontales et montrent leur tranchant. Le versant opposé du vallon apparaît alors en bandes successives, superposées, séparées par des blancs un peu plus étroits.

She has now taken refuge, even further to the right, in the corner of the room, which also constitutes the southwestern corner of the house. It would be easy to observe her through one of the two doors, that of the central corridor or that of the bathroom, but the doors are made of solid wood, lacking a system of blinds which allow one to see through. As for the blinds of the three windows, none currently permit one to see anything.

…

The three windows are alike, each one divided into four equal rectangles; that is to say, four sets of slats, each panel comprising two sets in terms of height. The twelve sets are identical: sixteen wooden slats operated as a piece by a lateral lever placed vertically against the external frame.

The sixteen slats of a given set remain continually parallel. When the system is closed, they are pressed against each other by their sides, overlapping one another by about a centimetre. By pushing the lever downwards, the inclination of the slats is reduced, thus creating a set of openings whose width progressively increases.

When the blinds are open to the maximum, the slats are almost horizontal and reveal their edge. The opposite slope of the valley then appears in successive, superimposed bands separated by slightly narrower gaps.

— Robbe-Grillet (2012, pp. 96. 141-2 [my translation])

Thus the obstructive white bands of the jalousies become objectively correlative for the state of jealousy itself: the ‘zone blanche’ of the sides of the slats and their edges creates a lacuna in the total sight of the narrational apparatus which can only be filled inferentially, hypothetically.

Inside her bedroom, A…’s actions, sitting at her desk writing a letter, are masked by the shutters. Equally, sitting on the veranda with Franck, the friendly act of sharing a drink becomes a ‘screen’ for plotting a potential assignation when viewed through the ‘système de jalousies‘—that is to say, through the sets of slats and through the machinery of the narrational apparatus itself.

Zarifopol-Johnston problematizes the ‘objective subjectivity’ of La Jalousie still further by arguing that the proto-cinematic style Robbe-Grillet of the novel is ‘a cinematic mind’, and Stoltzfus calls it an ‘inner film’—provocative assertions which further dematerialize the literary project of the most remorselessly materialistic writer in modernity.

Colette Audry, writing a year after the book’s release and anticipating Robbe-Grillet’s future career as a film director, perhaps put it best when she called the Absent-I technique a ‘regard déshumanisé, désensibilisé, objectal en un mot, d’une simple lentille de verre, d’un pur objectif’—a ‘gaze divested of humanity and sensitivity—in a word, material, as if made of a simple glass lens, a pure camera lens.’

And it is thus viewing these superficial structures of signification through the glassy lens of the Absent-I that we, as readers, feel rather than think the sensation of jealousy, as Morrissette puts it. The space, as a constellation of pregnant significations, becomes a state, a pre-conscious apprehension.

The suppressed subjectivity, as Stoltzfus says, becomes equally manifest as a material ‘fact’ of the objective environment in these early novels of Robbe-Grillet precisely by the ways in which the observer interacts in them. Thus you could say that the strategies of the Robbe-Grilletian ‘narration’, whether as what I called the ‘regard caché’ of Le Voyeur or as the je-néant of La Jalousie, is a means of ‘objectifying oneself’.