À mon gré, c’est le réverbère qui est l’heros du Labyrinthe de Robbe-Grillet.  Multiple mais solitaire, étroit et droit, il est néanmoins un dédale conique, rectiligne comme la rue.  Sous la neige il se tient, digne, entouré des vignes, leur noirceur blanchie par la glace.  À l’abri de sa brillance, dans une ville bâtie de chance, un soldat froid trouve un foyer éphemère de lumière dans l’infini du temps et de l’espace.

— Dean Kyte, “Un lampadaire”

In the twenty-first century, it is neither the novel, as the representative of literature, nor the movie, as the representative of cinema, that holds cultural sway over the minds of postmodern peoples in the West.

Rather, it is the video game, I believe, that is the dominant form of cultural production.

This is a rather depressing prospect for an homme de lettres who is equally an homme du cinéma as your Melbourne Flâneur is—one of the last, stubborn survivals into this century of the Faustian twentieth-century project of universal literacy.

As Marshall McLuhan argued in Understanding Media (1964), and as Walter J. Ong later argued in Orality and Literacy (1982), for nearly two centuries our new media technologies, as extensions of our capacity to communicate at a distance and at scale, have been gradually facilitating an escalating shift away from the high literacy required to interpret print towards what I call a ‘renaissance of orality’.

The cinema as a ‘graphic medium’, a techne that allows one to ‘write’ on film with light and movement, was but the first and greatest of these pseudo-literary ‘new media’ to translate the long prose form of the novel back into ‘story’—a fiction that is told rather than ‘narrated’.

As a child of the twentieth century, I maintain my chauvinistic passion for both books and films, and even as a gosse in the eighties and nineties, when the video game was just starting to compete with these dominant cultural forms, I could never get too interested in playing screen-based games.

I was a true child of the century in that, despite the fact that I love all manner of board games and other abstract intellectual competitions of skill and chance, from gambling to RPGs, the video game as an innovative, immersive iteration of the pseudo-literary, virtually cinematic narrative form could never hold my attention as much as a good novel or movie.

What did fascinate me, however, as a thoroughly literary and cinematic enfant in those days when video games were much less sophisticated than they are now, was to watch other people play through these primitive first-person RPGs where the decisions for advance into the virtual labyrinth of the game were algorithmically binary.

These were the days, of course, when the Choose Your Own Adventure novels were a fad to encourage literacy among millennial children, and the labyrinthine, binary, non-linearity of the reading experience that could be had through those books was reflected, mutatis mutandis, in the digital, algorithmic medium of the video games of the late eighties and early nineties.

The Choose Your Own Adventure novels put authorial control into the hands of children just as, in the video game, the joystick and the game controller allowed kids to ‘write’ their own adventures in the present tense of virtual experience.

Just as there is a parallel between archetypal myth and novelistic narrative, I would argue that there is also a deep parallel between game and narrative which the multidimensional ludic structure of the video game makes particularly manifest, although the board game and the more abstract rôle-playing game also demonstrate my contention.

In fine, the formal, rule-based elements of a multi-player game furnish the architecture for an emergent synchronous narrative to consequentially unfold. This is a form of synergistic ‘group writing’ distinct from the solo calculatory operations of the novelist working, in the privacy of his room, through the chain of logical consequences which fall out of the conceptual grille he instantiates in his solitary act of creative imagination.

In our postmodern age, the video game has ludically problematized the logical linear narrativity of the long prose form of the novel by making the three fundamental elements of an extensive narrative—location, character, and time—into a virtual, interactive gaming space.

These fundamental elements of literary narrative become like the three dimensions of the crystal lattice which comprise the labyrinthine grid of a video game: Through the first-person perspective of a character ranging over space and enduring over time, the player is able to penetrate and explore this virtual grid, and his interactions with non-player characters, whether helpful or antagonistic to his mission, furnish the ‘events’ of novelistic drama.

With his fourth published novel Dans le labyrinthe (In the Labyrinth, 1959), Alain Robbe-Grillet presciently writes what I think should properly be considered ‘the first video game’—albeit in print form: The technology of the mission-based, first-person rôle-playing computer game being not yet in existence, through his eminently cinematic writing, le père du Nouveau Roman essentially writes what will become ‘the novel of the future’—the postmodern video game.

The plot of Dans le labyrinthe is as schematic as that of any video game: Following the defeat of his army in a battle at Reichenfels, a soldier with a paper-wrapped box under his arm is on a mission to deliver it to someone he has never met in a city he has never visited before.

The details of the assignation are vague. The soldier has forgotten the name of the street where he is supposed to meet the recipient of the package and all he knows for sure is that he is supposed to wait beside a particular lamppost at a particular streetcorner out front of a particular building.

But all the lampposts, streetcorners and buildings of the city seem the same, and whatever route he takes in his search, the cold and weary soldier seems to find himself continually returning to the same lamppost at the same streetcorner before the same building, where he finds himself continually confronted by the same quizzical little boy who guides him back to the same place.

As Bruce Morrissette says in his article “Games and game structures in Robbe-Grillet” (1968), puzzles, riddles, illusions—all manner of ludic paradoxes—fascinated Alain Robbe-Grillet from his childhood, and his novels and films are filled with allusions to games.

‘I recall his once calculating rapidly and precisely the number of times a single sheet of paper would have to be folded to make its increased thickness reach from the earth to the moon,’ Morrissette writes, adding (in parentheses) that such a ludic enterprise ‘is a mathematical possibility’.

As Morrissette puts it at the end of his article, the game for Robbe-Grillet, as a form analogous to the literary enterprise of the Nouveau Roman, ‘has come to mean structural freedom, absence of traditional rules of transition, viewpoint, chronology, and other parameters of previous fiction….’

There is distinct game that Robbe-Grillet plays with the reader in each of his fictions, but of the four novels I have thus far addressed in this series of articles on his work, nowhere is the concept of ‘the game’ more salient as an operative metaphor for approaching the novel than in Dans le labyrinthe.

As Roy C. Caldwell, Jr. states in “The Robbe-Grillet Game” (1992), there is a ‘Labyrinthe game’ just as, in the previous novel I addressed, there was a ‘Jalousie game’. And, above and beyond all the individual games played by his literature, there is a superordinate ‘meta-game’—a ‘Robbe-Grillet game’—the author’s œuvre plays with us as readers.

One might even be tempted to define the ludism of the Robbe-Grilletian text by [Roger] Caillois’s term paidia (free-play) rather than by what he calls ludus (game). Paidia is play without rules; it occurs when no conventions yet exist to organize the operations in the play. While a ludic activity may originate as free-play, as it is repeated, it develops a convention, a tradition, a set of rules. Paidia tends inevitably towards ludus. When players first play a given game, they may be free to invent or include any kind of activity; if they play again, however, they inevitably refer to the authority of what happened the first time. Ludus requires memory; paidia has none. Robbe-Grillet’s texts are more aptly described not as exercises of free invention, but as peculiar, dynamic games which continue to formulate their body of rules as their narratives unfold. (Inventing the rules as one proceeds to play is generally considered something less than good sportsmanship, and thus Robbe-Grillet’s readers have often felt confused, if not ‘cheated.’)

— Roy C. Caldwell, Jr, “The Robbe-Grillet Game” (1992, pp. 549-50)

We assist at Robbe-Grillet’s improvisation as he essentially ‘makes up the rules’ of the novel as he goes along from the first pages of Dans le labyrinthe, which begins in a spirit of free imaginative play, rehearsing the potential ways a narrative could ‘get going’ out of objective relations suggested by the furnishings of a room.

A bed, a table, a lamp, the shapes described by objects that have interrupted the uniform patina of dust on surfaces:—these things suggest various structural permutations in the first twenty pages of the novel, out of which a snowy street and a soldier leaning against a lamppost with a wrapped box under his arm fitfully emerge.

Robbe-Grillet is ‘writing the code’ in these early pages: we assist as he establishes the algorithmic elements of the game-play—soldier, street, lamppost, snow, child, café, door, corridor, staircase, room, woman, box. From these fundamental elements he will rarely divert himself, though the variety he gives to these configurations over 200 pages appears to us as infinitely extensive a hermetic world as the virtual grid of a video game.

Thus, it is fair to say that the ‘operating system’ of the game, the initial labyrinth we enter as players in our contention with Robbe-Grillet’s text, is the algorithmic labyrinth of language itself.

Aussitôt le soldat confirme par des explications plus détaillées : mais, à peine lancé, un doute le prend, si bien qu’il préfère se limiter, par prudence, à une succession de phrases décousues, c’est-à-dire sans lien apparent, pour la plupart inachevées, et de toute façon très obscures pour son interlocuteur, où lui-même d’ailleurs s’embrouille davantage à chaque mot….

Le soldat, lui, ne sait plus comment s’arrêter. Il a tiré sa main droite de sa poche et l’avance en crispant les doigts, comme celui qui craindrait de laisser échapper quelque détail dont il se croit sur le point de fixer le souvenir, ou comme celui qui veut obtenir un encouragement, ou qui ne parvient pas à convaincre. Et il continue de parler, s’égarant dans une surabondance de précisions d’une confusion sans cesse croissante, s’en rendant compte tout à fait, s’arrêtant presque à chaque pas pour repartir dans une direction différente, persuadé maintenant, mais trop tard, de s’être fouvoyé dès le début et n’apercevant pas le moyen de se tirer d’affaire sans faire naître des soupçons plus graves encore chez cet anonyme promeneur qui prétendait seulement parler de la température, ou d’un sujet anodin du même genre, ou qui même ne lui demandait rien du tout — et qui du reste persiste à se taire.

The soldier immediately confirms with more detailed explanations; but, barely commenced, a doubt seizes him, so much so that he prefers to limit himself, out of prudence, to a succession of disjointed sentences, that is to say, without apparent connection, for the most part unfinished, and in any case very obscure for his interlocutor, in which he himself becomes more muddled with every word….

The soldier himself no longer knows how to stop. He has withdrawn his right hand from his pocket and advances it, clenching his fingers like someone possibly fearful of letting slip some detail he thinks himself on the verge of remembering, or like someone seeking to obtain encouragement, or who fails to convince. And he continues to talk, losing himself in a superabundance of details with an ever-growing confusion, quite conscious of the fact, halting almost at every step so as to start afresh in a different direction, now convinced—but too late—of having gone astray from the start and not seeing a way to extricate himself from the situation without causing even graver suspicions to be born in this anonymous passer-by who was merely purporting to talk about the temperature, or some anodyne subject of the same type, or who wasn’t even asking him anything at all—and who, moreover, persists in remaining silent.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dans le labyrinthe (1988, pp. 150-1 [my translation])

Aligned with the perspective of the soldier as our avatar in Robbe-Grillet’s Labyrinthe game, we find ourselves in continual contention with NPCs the author throws across our path as aids and adversaries to completion of the mission.

Some, like the young woman in the room upstairs, help us, while others, like the child who is apparently her son, seem more ambiguous in the information or assistance they provide, and others still, like the man with the crutch, appear alternately helpful and hostile to our attempts to deliver the box.

And as the algorithmic ‘rules of the game’ that bootstrap even the emergent property of narrative, the subtleties of the French language, as E. T. Rahv shows in her article “Robbe-Grillet’s uses of the past in Dans le labyrinthe” (1971), are significant markers in orienting us temporally, if not spatially, in Robbe-Grillet’s Labyrinthe game.

As the excerpt above demonstrates, the French present tense is to Robbe-Grillet’s style what the imperfect was to Flaubert’s or the conditional tense to Proust’s: it is his habitual mode of literary expression.

In English, the present tense has very limited literary utility. It sounds awkward to render sentence after sentence in a novel—which is necessarily a past-tense account rather than a present-tense recounting—in the English present tense, and it becomes eventually fatiguing to the reader.

By contrast, the French present tense sounds much more natural in the past-tense context of a novelistic account, possibly because the French present tense is much less reliant on the gerund form than English to convey a sense of real-time ‘happening’, and among French writers, Robbe-Grillet makes the most consistent use of its affordance to convey a sense of cinematic instantaneity.

And of course, in its illusionistic, cinematic quality of recounting something that has been written as if it were happening right now as in the dynamic algorithmic narrative of a video game, the present tense is eminently appropriate for a novel that utilizes the iterative, real-time randomnicity of game-play as an analogical conceit for its plot development.

But as Rahv shows in her article, where Robbe-Grillet uses the present perfect or the imperfect tense instead of conforming to his preference for the simple present tense in Dans le labyrinthe, he does so subtly yet pointedly to indicate that, although we might be in the same place as in the previous sentence or paragraph, we are there at a different time.

And in fact, as the novel progresses, Robbe-Grillet’s unusual employment of the past tense—what Rahv calls a ‘textual past’ similar to the present perfect tense of a cinematic flashback—takes over the account more or less completely.

A video game is conceptually similar to a labyrinth in that both structures appear infinite in their extension and convolution while being, in fact, paradoxically finite. They achieve this felt sense of infinity by means of two principles, repetition and recursion.

The plot of Dans le labyrinthe may be summarized as a repetitive, recursive re-entry into a sheltered space: whichever way the soldier turns, wherever he goes within the grid-like gaming space of Robbe-Grillet’s fictional city, he is repetitively, recursively returned to the same streetcorner, to the same building with its door ajar, to the same corridor and room.

Le soldat est seul, il regarde la porte devant laquelle il se trouve. Pourquoi l’enfant lui a-t-il indiqué cette maison-là plutôt qu’une autre, puisqu’il n’était chargé que de le mener jusqu’à cette rue? Quelle est d’ailleurs cette rue? Est-ce bien celle dont il s’agissait tout à l’heure? Le soldat ne parvient plus à se souvenir du nom auquel l’invalide tenait tant : c’était quelque chose comme Mallart ou Malabar, Malardier, Montoire, Moutardier… Non, ça ne ressemblait pas à cela.

… Il remarque à cet instant que la porte est entrouverte : porte, couloir, porte, vestibule, porte, puis enfin une pièce éclairée, et une table avec un verre vide dont le fond contient encore un cercle de liquide rouge sombre, et un infirme qui s’appuie sur sa béquille, penché en avant dans un équilibre précaire. Non. Porte entrebâillée. Couloir. Escalier. Femme qui monte en courant d’étage en étage, tout au long de l’étroit colimaçon où son tablier gris tournoie en spirale. Porte. Et enfin une pièce éclairée : lit, commode, cheminée, bureau avec une lampe posée dans son coin gauche, et l’abat-jour qui dessine au plafond un cercle blanc. Non. Au-dessus de la commode une gravure encadrée de bois noir est fixée… Non. Non. Non.

The soldier is alone. He looks at the door before which he finds himself. Why has the child pointed out this house rather than another since his only duty was to lead the soldier to this street? What is this street anyway? Is this the one they were discussing earlier? The soldier can no longer manage to remember the name the invalid was so definite about: it was something like Mallart or Malabar, Malardier, Montoire, Moutardier… No, it was nothing like that.

… At that moment he notices that the door is ajar: Door, corridor, door, vestibule, door, then finally a lighted room, and a table with an empty glass whose bottom still contains a circle of dark red liquid, and a disabled man who leans on his crutch, tilted forward in a precarious equilibrium. No. Half-open door. Corridor. Staircase. Woman who mounts at a run from floor to floor along the narrow staircase, her grey apron turning in a spiral. Door. And finally a lighted room: bed, chest of drawers, fireplace, desk with a lamp placed in its left corner, and the shade which draws a white circle on the ceiling. No. Above the chest of drawers an engraving framed in black wood is attached… No. No. No.

— Robbe-Grillet (1988, pp. 95-6 [my translation])

More than delivering the box even, his ‘challenge’, as our avatar in this ludic space, is to re-enter, to return to safety, and, like a character in a video game, the soldier, unable to graduate beyond this simple challenge, must eternally repeat it, extending the physical labyrinth of the gaming space into the dimension of time.

But as the excerpt above shows, Robbe-Grillet anticipates the future video game by matrically rearranging a fundamental set of ordering elements that structure the algorithmic gameplay of the novelistic narrative. The permutations that this closed set of objects may undergo is not infinite, but there are enough of these replicable elements that the n of potential combinations they can be put through appears to the perplexed reader/soldier lost in this conceptual labyrinth to be effectively infinite.

Thus, whatever street he turns down, the soldier is turning down the same street, and as Robbe-Grillet, in his customarily meticulous description of the lamppost, shows, with the basis for its intricate design in a cast-iron mold, once described, it’s a very simple process for the novelist to ‘copy paste’ this singular lamppost all along the length and breadth of his infinite street.

Indeed, one of the few things that fascinated me as an ado either watching or playing video games—(and this is perhaps an early indication of my pedestrian destiny as a flâneur IRL)—lay in exploring the limits and boundaries of the seemingly infinite gaming space.

I don’t know if it’s still the case today, but in those days if one kept walking long enough down the seemingly endless corridor or past the infinitely copy-pasted trees, one would always find oneself nez-à-nez against a hard, though invisible, wall, a forcefield representing the computational limits of the gaming space.

As an artefactual object, the physical novel itself imposes similar limits and boundaries upon the game that Robbe-Grillet can play with his reader, but ‘dans le labyrinthe’—within the abstract conceptual grid of 200 pages, each covered with a maximum 28 lines of the French language put through its combinatorial possibilities—he goes quite far in giving us an impression, as in a video game, that the space is infinite due to these replicated repetitions of modular elements.

This repetition of elements iterated through conceptual space that Robbe-Grillet effects through a modern, literary version of our postmodern ‘copy paste’ æsthetic opens out the novel for the reader with a feeling of infinity while strictly bounding the legal moves Robbe-Grillet can narratively play, when his structure is fully instantiated, within the labyrinth.

And of course, replicated repetition extends even to the characters—none of whom have even names to distinguish them, such that the dramatis personæ of Dans le labyrinthe are truly the first NPCs in literature.

Thus we meet with the archetypal n of potential human forms—man, woman and child—infinitely iterated by this ‘copy paste’ æsthetic, and the weary soldier—who may be any soldier—is continually asking himself if it’s the same child or another he is continually meeting beneath the same lamppost or another.

Repetition of formal elements in extensivity is also reflected in the dimension of depth as recursion in Dans le labyrinthe. Thus, as I said above, if anything could be said to ‘happen’ in the novel, it is the soldier’s action of continual re-entry into sheltered space—into building, café, room—but also into the engraving on the wall of that room depicting reactions to the news of the army’s defeat at Reichenfels in the café downstairs—and which appears to show our soldier as one of the assistants at that announcement.

In a hand-drawn graph appended to his pioneering article on the novel, “The Structure of Robbe-Grillet’s Labyrinth” (1965), James Lethcoe convincingly argues that there are actually three nested layers of linear plot in Dans le labyrinthe—not to mention the fourth conceptual level of the labyrinth within the imagination of Robbe-Grillet himself.

In Lethcoe’s view, it is this engraving, “La défaite de Reichenfels”, which is the generative ludic matrix bounding the entire novel, and among the buveurs and bavardeurs in the café which is sometimes situated on the ground floor of the building before which the soldier stands, we find the soldier himself seated between two comrades who are sometimes transposed reflections of himself.

Tous les personnages y sont à leur place: le patron derrière son bar, le médecin au manteau doublé de fourrure dans le groupe des bourgeois qui se tiennent par-devant, mais posté un peu à l’écart des autres et ne se mêlant pas à leur conversation, l’enfant assis par terre contre un banc surchargé de buveurs, près d’une chaise renversée, tenant toujours la boîte serrée dans ses bras, et la jeune femme en robe froncée, aux cheveux sombres, au port majestueux, élevant son plateau garni d’une unique bouteille par-dessus la tête des consommateurs attablés, le soldat enfin, assis à la plus petite des tables entre ses deux camarades, simples fantassins comme lui, vêtus comme lui d’un capote boutonnée jusqu’au col et d’un calot, fatigués comme lui, ne voyant rien — non plus — autour d’eux, se tenant comme lui raides sur leurs chaises et se taisant comme lui. Ils ont tous les trois exactement le même visage ; la seule différence entre eux est que l’un se présente de profil gauche, le second de face, le troisième de profil droite ; et leurs bras sont pliés pareillement, les six mains reposant de la même façon sur la table, dont la toile cirée à petits carreaux retombe, à l’angle, en plis rigides aux formes coniques.

All the characters are in their place: the publican behind his bar, the doctor with the fur-lined overcoat among the group of burghers who stand in front, but placed a little apart from the others and not involving himself in their conversation, the child seated on the ground against a banquette overloaded with drinkers, near an overturned chair, forever holding the box tightly in his arms, and the young woman in the frilly dress, with the dark hair, with the majestic bearing, raising her tray garnished with a single bottle above the heads of the patrons at their tables, finally the soldier, seated at the smallest table between his two comrades, simple infantrymen like himself, dressed like him in a greatcoat buttoned to the neck and a forage cap, tired like him, seeing nothing—anymore—in their vicinity, holding themselves stiffly on their seats like him and keeping quiet like him. All three have exactly the same face; the only difference between them is that one presents his left profile, the second faces forward, and the third his right profile; and their arms are likewise folded, the six hands resting in the same manner on the table, whose oilcloth with small checks falls, at its corners, in rigid folds with conical shapes.

— Robbe-Grillet (1988, pp. 203-4 [my translation])

According to Lethcoe, this puzzling image, which is first described extensively between pages 24 and 29, on the base level of the novel’s reality, and which periodically recurs throughout the book, its details being further shaded in or changed, is the two-dimensional source of the entire three-dimensional game space Robbe-Grillet imagines for us.

As Jean Ricardou (cited by Caldwell in his 1992 article) might put it, “La défaite de Reichenfels” is the ‘dispositif’—the fundamental device, the elemental engine—that pre-exists the narrative, and which determines what algorithmic ‘turns’ or ‘moves’ in storytelling may legally fall out of the engraving’s labyrinthine network of logical constraints.

Whatever turns he takes once his ludic narrative structure is fully established, there must always be a soldier, a woman, a child in Robbe-Grillet’s narrative; there must always be a street, a building, a lamppost, a mysterious box and snow; there must always be the shelter of a room and a bed, and the comfort of a chair, a table, and a glass of red wine to which the soldier must repetitively, recursively attempt to return.

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