—I just think—…  Miriam abruptly swallowed her whispered words.

Al’s lips pressed more tightly together as he watched the needle indicating the floors sweep down.  If only Miriam were…—somewhere else.

Roberts staggered past them and swayed uncertainly in the lobby.  Verna was now very far away from him.

To Verna, he thought.

—Dean Kyte, “Crisscross”

Today’s video on The Melbourne Flâneur, “Crisscross”, represents an experimental departure for me, as I fling myself into new flâneurial territory of æsthetic investigation. I return to my pseudo-Cornellian, Conneresque roots, where the only ‘making’ of the film I can claim, in this instance, lies in the editorial realm of pure montage.

Three shots of second-unit stock footage mounted and hence tenuously related to each other, and an elliptical narrative in the nouvelle démeublée noire style which that short sequence seemed to suggest to me in a flash of inspiration;—C’est “Crisscross”.

I don’t know anything more about what’s going on in the conte than what the artifactual text (understood as the totality of image, sound and word) suggests, and this is the ambiguous, mysterious essence of the style of ‘literary crime fiction’ I call the nouvelle démeublée noire, based on the theoretical principles of the French Nouveau Roman articulated by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

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])

I continue my ongoing deep dive into the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet with a saunter through the eminent Academician’s collection of short stories, Instantanés (Snapshots, 1962).

Chers lecteurs with long memories may recall that I have already addressed the subject of Instantanés in a previous post on The Melbourne Flâneur—“The cinematic writing of Alain Robbe-Grillet”, published en pleine pandémie back in January 2021.

That post is one of the ten most popular in the lifetime history of this vlog. Its ongoing popularity, racking up exponentially more page views every month, testifies to the interest I have succeeded in arousing—especially among nos amis aux États-Unis—with my modest crusade to rehabilitate the reputation of a once influential, now unfashionable, French novelist and filmmaker.

When I first wangled a French copy of Instantanés off Amazon as one of my reads during the pandemic, The Spleen of Melbourne project was not only starting to crystallize under the imaginative constraints and pressures of lockdown, but it began to kick tentatively into a new phase.

In fine, at that time, diverging from the main channel of the prose poetry I was then writing about Melbourne’s Parisian underbelly under the influence of Baudelaire, a specifically fictional—as opposed to prose-poetic—sub-project began to emerge as an offshoot of The Spleen of Melbourne.

Elements latent in the prose poems I had written up to that time began to take on a new clarity and definition and began to demand a more analytic rather than lyric treatment.

I went straight to Robbe-Grillet and the short stories of Instantanés as sources of advice and inspiration on how I should practically proceed in treating these short pieces which I instinctively knew would owe a debt to the theoretic principles of the Nouveau Roman.

Robbe-Grillet’s world is neither meaningful nor absurd; it merely exists. Omnipresent is the object—hard, polished, with only the measurable characteristics of pounds, inches, and wavelengths of reflected light. It overshadows and eliminates plot or character. …

If Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, with its timetables, careful inventories of things, and reports on arrivals and departures, owes anything to the traditional novel, it is to the detective story.

—Encylopædia Britannica, “Alain Robbe-Grillet”

And hence, what I variously call ‘the Jamesian/Robbe-Grilletian style’, the ‘literary crime fiction’, and the ‘nouvelle démeublée noire’ was born as a sub-project of The Spleen of Melbourne.

More than four years on from those stuttering experiments ‘pour une nouvelle nouvelle’ (to coin a particularly unidiomatic Gallicism), it seems a good time to reinvestigate the six nouvelles Robbe-Grillet collects under the head of Instantanés.

This concise book is a pivotal work in quite a literal sense:—like a hinge, Robbe-Grillet’s whole career turns upon it.

Instantanés recapitulates in miniature the chosiste style and technique of the 1950s novels I have analyzed in my previous articles in this series and which form the basis of what I call—(with a reverential nod toward fellow Anglophonic Francophile Willa Cather)—the nouvelle démeublée or ‘unfurnished short story’, since the idea of a ‘Nouvelle Nouvelle’, or ‘New Short Story’ written in the style of the Robbe-Grilletian Nouveau Roman, doesn’t make a great deal of sense in French.

Moreover, in the final short story of Instantanés, written significantly after the other works in the volume, at a time in the early sixties when Robbe-Grillet’s public and critical reputation as a writer and filmmaker is at its absolute peak, he gives a tantalizing—and not altogether palatable—preview of his direction of æsthetic travel from this point forward to the end of his career.

In the last novel we examined, Dans le labyrinthe (1959), Robbe-Grillet had begun to diverge appreciably from the quasi-noirish, chosiste style of his first three novels. The first five stories of Instantanés—“Trois visions réfléchies” (“Three Reflected Visions” in Bruce Morrissette’s translation), “Le Chemin du retour” (“The Way Back”), “Scène” (“Scene”), “La Plage” (“The Shore”), and “Dans les couloirs du Métropolitain” (“In the Corridors of the Métro”)—date from the years between the publication of Les Gommes (1953) and Dans le labyrinthe, and display the cold, hard, objectival style that initially brought Robbe-Grillet to the attention of the French reading public as a savantic freak of literature specializing in an inhuman kind of novel.

But in those same years, through a succession of literary prizes and laudatory appraisals from perspicacious early critics like Roland Barthes, Robbe-Grillet had succeeded in finessing himself from the margins of French literature to become the absolutely central and dominating figure by the end of the decade as the veritable ‘chef d’école’ du Nouveau Roman.

At this point, at the end of the fifties, Robbe-Grillet’s public and critical reputation catalyzed into an international fame that transcended the Francophonic world. With American interpreters and translators like Bruce Morrissette and Richard Howard as his champions, he conquered the States and thus the English-speaking world.

Yet, at the height of his international fame as a quintessentially French, high-brow novelist of a new type, in the next few years, Robbe-Grillet’s schedule of literary production declined, and instead of releasing a new, critically anticipated novel in the expected year of 1961, he went the conventional route of the commercially successful novelist and became a screenwriter.

It is in that year that Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad, based on a script by Robbe-Grillet, was released, and Marienbad became a global cause célèbre—‘le dernier cri’ in the phenomenon of the inscrutable European art film.

It was on the back of Marienbad that Instantanés was released, and if we see in the film not merely a lossless translation to cinematic form of Robbe-Grillet’s literary principles of chosisme as demonstrated in the short stories of the fifties, we can also see the generative influence of Marienbad reflected darkly, thematically forward in the last fiction of Instantanés, “La Chambre secrète” (“The Secret Room”), linking Robbe-Grillet’s new line of æsthetic experimentation, as commenced with Dans le labyrinthe, to the style of his films and novels in the 1960s.

As The Spleen of Melbourne project has advanced and developed simultaneously on two fronts which I regard as distinct—prose poetry and short fiction—Instantanés has remained as seminal a text for me with respect to the latter as Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (1868) is with respect to the former.

And as I now begin to rehearse the ‘scripts’—the cold, hard, objectival nouvelles démeublées of the forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast written in a French-inflected, English version of the chosiste style of Instantanés—for audiences as part of my market testing for the podcast, I am surprised to hear how that bitterly analytic and inhumane fictive style sounds for my listeners like my lyrical, multilingual prose poetry!

It was not long after I released The Spleen of Melbourne CD in 2021 that I began to seriously interrogate myself as to whether Robbe-Grillet’s short stories in Instantanés, with their maniacal descriptive exactitude, could in fact be considered ‘petits poèmes en prose’.

Une idée folle, parbleu!

Description, deprecated by fiction as merely a utilitarian means of setting the scene for human drama, is elevated to a significant tool and strategy for forestalling and preventing the emergence of narrative in the prose poem.

As many listeners of my audio tracks note, as in Robbe-Grillet’s short stories, description plays such a salient rôle in my prose poetry that it overwhelms the human element, forcing what might become ‘characters’ in a story into the background, as mere figures in a landscape, pregnant with its own drama operating on longer, inhuman timelines, and thus unobservable by the anthropocentric eye.

While Robbe-Grillet might not have been personally hostile to poetry, he is hostile to the pathetic fallacy of poetry’s necessarily anthropocentric view of the objective world of things in his prose.

Narrative is the fallaciously selective structure that human subjects impose as a Foucauldian ‘grille’ over an objective world whose mathematical variety is beyond the regulation of our senses and cognition by incalculable orders of magnitude.

To put it unkindly (and I don’t think Robbe-Grillet would disagree too profoundly with me in this dismissive analysis), the mechanistic structure of faulty logic we call ‘narrative’ is a despicable form of ‘magical thinking’ whose evolutionary utility to human beings as a sensemaking heuristic has been over since at least the end of the Second World War.

In the nouvelles of Instantanés, Robbe-Grillet, by his maniacal technique of emphasizing static description and deprecating human agency, manages to forestall and prevent the emergence of narrative—of anthropocentrically observable cause and effect—more successfully than he is able to do so in his novels.

This is because the nouvelles of Instantanés share with prose poetry the fundamental criterion identified by the scholar Suzanne Bernard in her seminal—and monumental—work on the subject, Le poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (1959)—which is to say, these short stories are exceedingly brief.

Bernard identified the criterion of brevity as one of the few discernible essentials in this hybrid, interstitial genre of literature emerging from the French prosodic tradition in the nineteenth century.

Pedro Baños Gallego of the University of Murcia tested Bernard’s criterion by assessing the work of four nineteenth-century prose poets following Baudelaire’s trailblazing example and found that of all the criteria for the form suggested by various critics and scholars, brevity was in fact the most reliable trait for identifying a potentially poetic text written in prose.

Voici quatre auteurs qui représentent quatre manières assez dissemblables d’envisager la création du poème en prose. En laissant de côté leurs différences quant aux choix de thèmes, lexique, syntaxe ou distribution des paragraphes, nous observons qu’ils vont tous converger dans la recherche d’une certaine longueur dont les limites ne sont pas trop floues. Après la lecture des quatre recueils, il nous semble que la frontière établie entre les trois – quatre pages reste toujours présente pour eux. Même si c’était l’époque de l’éclatement du genre et de l’expérimentation technique, où le corpus des œuvres s’adhérant à l’étiquette « poème en prose » faisait preuve d’une hétérogénéité notoire, voici la constatation empirique de l’existence d’une conscience collective concernant, du moins, la longueur des textes.

Here are four authors who represent four quite different ways of considering the creation of a poem in prose. Leaving aside their differences concerning the choice of themes, vocabulary, syntax or paragraphing, we observe that all converge in their search for a certain length whose limits are not too vague. After reading the four collections, it seems to us that an established limit of between three and four pages remains a constant for these authors. Even if the late nineteenth century was the period in which the form—and technical experimentation with it—burst upon the scene, where the body of works adhering to the designation ‘prose poem’ displayed a notable heterogeneity, here a collective consciousness concerning, at least, the length of texts is empirically observed.

—Pedro Baños Gallego, “À la recherche des traits fondamentaux du poème en prose” (2019, p. 91 [my translation])

Three to four pages is the rough equivalent of 1,000 words, and thus, the threshold at which the static image of the prose poem undergoes a phase shift and the dynamism of narrative begins to enter the equation is round about the point where the prose text is accepted to be a ‘short story’—more specifically, what is nowadays termed ‘flash fiction’.

Except for the three quasi-independent vignettes which comprise both “Trois visions réfléchies” and “Dans les couloirs du Métropolitain”, the six short stories of Instantanés exceed this thousand-word threshold, but not by very much, with no work in the collection attaining even 2,500 words.

Thus, Robbe-Grillet largely manages to maintain the poetic ‘tension’ that scholar Yves Vadé saw as a peculiar property of the prosodic prose text, a tension of ‘stasis as image’ that fundamentally countervails against narrative’s prosaic drive towards dynamism, resisting its urge towards action, and thus the perception of human drama in the environment.

When we look at Marienbad, one of the first things we are struck by is Robbe-Grillet’s obsession with static tableaux, the mannequin-like poses of the actors, a signifying structure that appears prominently in no less than three of the short stories in Instantanés—“Le mannequin”, the first of the vignettes in “Trois visions réfléchies”; “L’escalier mécanique” and “La portillon automatique”, two of the vignettes in “Dans les couloirs du Métropolitain”; and “La Chambre secrète”.

According to Baños Gallego and Yves Vadé, ‘ekphrasis’, the detailed description of a work of visual art, was once a standard device in poetry, and as the ancient lyric poet Simonides of Ceos observed: ‘Poetry is a painting that speaks; painting, a silent poem.’

Since Baudelaire’s time, the relationship of prose poetry to photography has been remarked on by critics, and as a specifically modern, urban, poetic form, the poem in prose grew apace with the French—and specifically Parisian—revolution in photography during the nineteenth century.

Just as Baños Gallego finds a firm limit to the extent of the poem in prose, it seems more than structurally coincidental to me that the ‘flash fiction’ of Instantanés should take the ekphrastic concetto of the prosaic ‘snapshot’ as their literary analogue: The operative conceit of the ‘cliché’—(in both its French and English senses)—aligns Robbe-Grillet’s cinematic/literary project in this collection with the poetic tradition of ‘word-painting’ that Baudelaire’s direct and acknowledged influence, Aloysius Bertrand, invokes in the subtitle to his seminal collection of urban prose poems, Gaspard de la Nuit (1842).

Indeed, “La Chambre secrète” is entirely a deceptive exercise in pseudo-cinematic ekphrasis, and I would go so far as to say that “Scène”, with its theatrical aping of both painting and film, could also be considered an exercise in same.

Robbe-Grillet differs, however, from the poet in prose in that the function of description in the very elevated rôle he gives it in his fictions is essentially constructive: ‘Je ne décris pas, je construis’—‘I do not describe,’ he says, ‘I build.’

Here is explicit, definitive negation—by the author himself, no less—of Robbe-Grillet as a potential poet in prose: If description is a key tool and technique in prose poetry, Robbe-Grillet’s denial that he describes but rather ‘builds up’ a painterly image, as he does explicitly in “La Chambre secrète”, purely out of the material of words divorced from their referents, is a significant repudiation.

In this final nouvelle of the collection, written (one imagines) explicitly for the volume, Robbe-Grillet starts down a pathway that is appreciably different from the æsthetic parcours of the fifties charted by the first five stories and developmentally intercalated with the novels we have already investigated.

Where chosisme was Robbe-Grillet’s initial approach to a potential ‘New Novel’ and ‘New Short Story’, an explicit attention paid to the physical properties of objects and structures in the world without regard to their significance to human beings, in “La Chambre secrète” Robbe-Grillet develops a technique that is ancillary to the chosiste approach in Le Voyeur (1955), more significantly developed as a major branching from that path in Dans le labyrinthe, and, I suspect, was concretized by the kinetic affordances of cinema during his collaboration with Resnais on Marienbad.

Thus, rather than fictions that seek to forestall or prevent the emergence of a human-centred narrative by focusing as hard as possible on the world of things, in “La Chambre secrète”, we assist at a miniaturized, altogether more satisfying repetition of the experiment Robbe-Grillet undertakes in Dans le labyrinthe, watching as the text appears almost to ‘generate itself’.

Language and a certain poetic concatenation of ideas (which the poem in prose is perfectly poised to navigate and negotiate in its interstitial relation to both forms) work quasi-autonomously in this final nouvelle to generate a phantasy implied in Le Voyeur and Marienbad but now made explicit for the first time in Robbe-Grillet’s œuvre.

As Ronald L. Bogue makes clear in his article “A Generative Phantasy: Robbe-Grillet’s ‘La Chambre secrète’” (1981), a run of complex puns in the French serves, like a stream of consciousness, to progressively displace ideas produced in the ekphrastic description of images along tangential lines that ‘build up’ a unitary image in the most literal sense.

Bogue proposes the intriguing possibility of a coherent interrelationship between all the disparate texts in Instantanés written by Robbe-Grillet over an eight-year period, culminating in the tableau of “La Chambre secrète”.

I think this is unlikely, but as Roy J. Caldwell, Jr. argues in “Ludic Narrative in ‘La Chambre secrète’” (1993), in this final story, the operative conceit of the snapshot that Robbe-Grillet has employed to unify the disparate texts of the volume now becomes his modus ludens with the reader.

Doubtless inspired by his recent collaboration with Resnais and his own foray into filmmaking, whereas, in the preceding nouvelles, Robbe-Grillet has presented each story as reducible to a singular image (or triptych of such images), in the final and most ambitious story, the work is ‘composed’ of a montage of snapshots: It’s almost as if the earlier stories train us in how to read the last one as Robbe-Grillet prepares to go in a new direction in the sixties, abandoning chosisme for the auto-generative sado-erotic phantasies he dishonestly imputes to the novelistic and cinematic texts themselves.

L’écriture de Robbe-Grillet est sans alibi, sans épaisseur et sans profondeur : elle reste à la surface de l’objet et la parcourt également, sans privilégier telle ou telle de ses qualités : c’est donc le contraire même d’une écriture poétique.

Robbe-Grillet’s writing is without defence, lacking thickness and depth: it remains on the object’s surface and scans it evenly, without privileging any of its qualities. It is therefore the very opposite of poetic writing.

—Roland Barthes, “Littérature objective”, in Essais critiques (1964, p. 30 [my tranlsation])

I think this is undeniably true, and when I take the authoritative negation of Barthes along with denials made by the author himself, I have to rationally accept that Alain Robbe-Grillet is definitely not a poet in prose.

Yet, when it comes to the nouvelles of Instantanés which have been such fruitful sources of investigation in my own æsthetic parcours during the last four years, still I cannot shake the irrational feeling that, despite their coldness, their objectivity, their inhumanity, these short stories are so close to prose poetry as to be virtually indistinguishable from it.

Too many of the six pieces—“La mauvaise direction”, “Le Chemin du retour”, “La Plage”, and even “La Chambre secrète”—as much as they are ‘contes’ in the strict sense, take place in such abstract spaces (‘space’ as understood here as including the temporal dimension) that, as examinations of pre-existing structures in the environment that signify, they exist more in the kind of platonic, ideal world of the Rimbaudian illumination, the Kafkaesque fable—the various fragmentary territories taken in by the prose poem.

And even in those works which I have translated to refine my understanding of Robbe-Grillet’s style as I develop a French-inflected, English equivalent for the nouvelles démeublées of The Melbourne Flâneur, the purely mechanical structures of the Parisian Métro Robbe-Grillet describes—and which I recognize from my own experience of them—seem surreally, marvellously transformed by the flâneurial regard playing over escalator, tiled corridor, and possibly malfunctioning automatic gate.

As a sub-project of The Spleen of Melbourne, the chosiste pieces of The Melbourne Flâneur are moving ahead: In addition to writing new episodes, I am now designing soundscapes for the nouvelles démeublées, cobbled together from the more than 400 documentary recordings I have taken all over Melbourne during the past four years.

And as I begin to share the finished short stories in live readings, testing the market for a documentary on contemporary Melbourne life written in the objectival style of the Nouveau Roman, I am gratified to hear that there is curiosity, interest, and even a little excitement about this project—including a small knot of interest emanating from locations in Canada and the U.S.

I am still some distance from being in a place where I feel comfortable to begin releasing episodes on a regular basis, but if you are among those interested in speeding me along, the best way you can show your support is by purchasing the audio track below.

You can name your own price at the checkout and you can also opt in to become a fan of your Melbourne Flâneur on Bandcamp, where I will begin releasing episodes in due course.