The spaces of cinematic and literary noir have their roots in the supernatural vision of Poe. In this video essay, Dean Kyte reads a thoughtful, lyrical passage from Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950).
He was staying at the Hotel Montecarlo, about ten blocks from the Hotel Ritz, a great shabby building that looked like the former residence of a military general. One entered it through a wide carriage drive, paved in black and white tile like a bathroom floor. This gave into a huge dark lobby, also tile floored. There was a grotto-like bar-room and a restaurant that was always empty. Stained marble stairs wound around the patio, and going up behind the bellhop yesterday, Guy had seen, through open doorways and windows, a Japanese couple playing cards, a woman kneeling at prayer, people writing letters at tables or merely standing with a strange air of captivity. A masculine gloom and an untraceable promise of the supernatural oppressed the whole place, and Guy had liked it instantly, though the Faulkners, including Anne, chaffed him about his choice.
His cheap little room in a back corner was crammed with pink and brown painted furniture, had a bed like a fallen cake, and a bath down the hall. Somewhere down in the patio, water dripped continuously, and the sporadic flush of toilets sounded torrential.
When he got back from the Ritz, Guy deposited his wristwatch, a present from Anne, on the pink bed table, and his billfold and keys on the scratched brown bureau, as he might have done at home. He felt very content as he got into bed with his Mexican newspaper and a book on English architecture that he had found at the Alameda book-store that afternoon. After a second plunge at the Spanish, he leaned his head back against the pillow and gazed at the offensive room, listened to the little ratlike sounds of human activity from all parts of the building. What was it that he liked, he wondered. To immerse himself in ugly, uncomfortable, undignified living so that he gained new power to fight it in his work? Or was it a sense of hiding from Miriam? He would be harder to find here than at the Ritz.
—Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950, pp. 50-1)
As un adhérent du Nouveau Roman who has decentred characters from his narratives and made architecture their star, I was delighted when I read the passage above in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950) last year.
Though a little purple round their edges—(as stained, perhaps, as the place they describe)—I nevertheless felt, for three paragraphs, almost as if I were reading one of my own ficciones intercalated into Highsmith’s literary crime novel.
In those three paragraphs, Patricia Highsmith imagines—fully a dozen years before Resnais and Robbe-Grillet—Marienbad, albeit she sites that labyrinthine hôtel onirique en Mexique, the land loved by the surrealists.
Strangers on a Train is a young novelist’s book: the brushwork is a little loose, the colour a little too chromatic. Highsmith is not yet in possession of the tight, Jamesian command of character and moral situation she will evince but half a decade later in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). Yet more so than in that book (which the Library of America chose to include as a representative example in its collection Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s), Strangers on a Train is definitely a roman noir.
And, as a mere slip of a girl at thirty, Highsmith had at least written a novel which could command the attention of Hitchcock.
A couple of months ago in Melbourne, I saw Hitchcock’s 1951 adaptation of Strangers on a Train in what I’m sure must have been the first time in over twenty years. It was the second half in a double-bill that included North by Northwest (1959)—(can you believe seeing those two together on the big screen in one night?)—and whereas I knew every line and shot of the first film by heart, Strangers on a Train had slumbered so long in my memory that it was virtually like seeing it fresh.
Like Highsmith’s novel, technically I was surprised to find the film a little slipshod for Hitch: he has a matte photograph of Washington’s Capitol that manages to jump three times in a single setup; he relies a little too heavily on ill-matching stock footage for the tennis match, and the pro doubling for Farley Granger can’t possibly be mistaken for him at a distance.
But I walked out of that double feature into a dark, rainy, prematurely chill midnight in Carlton pulling my trenchcoat more tightly about me and thinking that, if a legitimate case can be made for any of Alfred Hitchcock’s films as being ‘noir’, then surely Strangers on a Train is at least as viable a contender as the oft-proposed Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
The Highsmith/Hitchcock intersection points to something fundamental about this vaporous thing called ‘noir’: both the novelist and the cinéaste are moralists in the domain of crime fiction, tellers of ‘moral tales’, though the telling of such contes moraux comes more naturally to the writer than to the filmmaker, who must principally convey his moral tone visually rather than by means of language.
There’s a whole tedious chapter (if memory serves) of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) in which Victor Hugo bangs on with his usual exhausting gusto about the architecture of the eponymous Parisian cathedral, sententiously arguing for it as a veritable ‘bible in stone’ whose every arch and capital is a letter in its visual language.
Film noir is primarily a ‘tonal’ quality of the cinematic treatment of those things in actuality which must serve the filmmaker as his alphabet—the streets, the buildings, the people, their fashions and conveyances, of modernity.
As an historical phenomenon, film noir was an æsthetic movement in the visual treatment of actuality, a distinctly expressionistic inflection of cinema’s native tendency towards realism.
As a stylistic movement proper to the artistic medium of film rather than a literary genre, film noir was, therefore, a set of ‘visual strategies’ for treating urban modernity that encompass all aspects of the cinematic apparatus but principally those native to the medium—lighting, camerawork, mise-en-scène and montage.
Film noir was an æsthetic portfolio of techniques for subjectively inflecting the image of built space, and as such, it produces an impression of ‘hyper-reality’, and thus a mood of ‘dis-ease’ in the viewer as he encounters a form of the ‘uncanny valley’ in the anthropocentric environment of the modern city.
The image of the city, this social environment built by humans ostensibly for humans—but which actually serves to alienate human beings precisely because of its ‘over-humanness’, its continual reference to anthropocentric concerns—becomes unsettlingly ambiguous in film noir.
As a tonal mood to depictions of the city, the affective character of film noir suggests an uncanny ‘doubleness’ to the faces which the spaces of modern actuality present to us when they are reduced to pure, geometric, architectonic forms by black-and-white cinematography.
… [O]blique and vertical lines are preferred to horizontal. Obliquity adheres to the choreography of the city, and is in direct opposition to the horizontal American tradition…. Oblique lines tend to splinter a screen, making it restless and unstable. Light enters the dingy rooms of film noir in such odd shapes—jagged trapezoids, obtuse triangles, vertical slits—that one suspects the windows were cut out with a pen-knife. No character can speak authoritatively from a space which is being continually cut into ribbons of light.
I say ‘realism’ because a totally uninflected image—one that is Newtonianly objective, which does not assume the position of a limited, subjective observer—is presently impossible to us. That’s still one of the charming limits of the artistic medium of cinema: a filmed image partakes of the ‘genre’ of realism without ever attaining the objective reality of which it gives the viewer a convincing impression.
In this sense, at its least inflected, even a documentary film may be as much a work of ‘realism’ as a novel by Zola—and fall as far short of a purely scientific description of actuality as his pretenses to ‘objectivity’ through the literary medium of long-form fiction.
But what forcibly struck the French-Italian critic Nino Frank in the article where he coined the term ‘film noir’ to describe a certain genre of American policier was precisely this vigorous impression of a ‘new realism’—a ‘neorealismo’, if you will—in these wartime thrillers, detective stories for the most part, but also reverse-engineered stories—like Double Indemnity (1944)—in which ordinary men and women lured into committing crime played the starring rôles rather than the sleuth uncovering their guilt.
Ainsi ces films « noirs » n’ont-ils plus rien de commun avec les bandes policières du type habituel. Récits nettement psychologiques, l’action, violente ou mouvementée, y importe moins que les visages, les comportements, les paroles – donc la vérité des personnages, cette « troisième dimension » …. Et c’est un gros progrès : après les films comme ceux-ci, les personnages des bandes policières usuelles ont l’air de fantoches. Or il n’est rien à quoi le spectateur d’aujourd’hui soit plus sensible qu’à cette empreinte de la vie, du « vécu », et, pourquoi pas, à certaines atrocités qui existent effectivement et qu’il n’a jamais servi à rien d’occulter ; la lutte pour la vie n’est pas une invention actuelle.
Thus these ‘dark’ movies have nothing in common with the usual kind of detective yarns. Distinctly psychological stories, action, in these films, whether violent or frenetic, is less important than the faces, behaviours, words—hence, the truth of these characters, that ‘third dimension’…. And this is a major step forward: after movies like these, characters in the usual detective stories appear insubstantial. Now, there is nothing towards which today’s filmgoer might be more sensitive than this trace of life, of ‘life as it is lived’, and—why not?—towards certain atrocities that actually exist, and which it has never done any good at all to hide: The struggle for life is not a current invention.
Frank was writing two years to the month after the Liberation of Paris, and ‘life as it is lived’ during what the French call ‘les années noires’ of the Nazi Occupation had certainly been dark and full of ‘certain atrocities’.
Just as, for the Italians, the dying months of Nazi Occupation give fruitful birth to a ‘new realism’ in cinema that trenchantly refuses to hide those ‘certain atrocities’ which actually exist in the struggle for life, so for the French, more keyed to the existential implications of the crime genre, film noir, as a stylistic inflection of generic thriller material, adds a ‘third dimension’ to cinema—that of the moral psychology of crime.
By German Expressionism out of French Poetic Realism, film noir is a set of visual strategies that forcibly inflect with psychological subjectivity the ‘objective’ image photographed by this non-intentional artistic medium: the architectonic shapes and spaces of urban modernity become effective ‘crime scenes’, freighted with desire, rage, melancholy and dread.
As Paul Schrader outlines in “Notes on Film Noir”, how the spaces of urban modernity are lit, the time of day at which they are photographed, whether the setting is given as much compositional emphasis as the actors, and how active a rôle the cinematic apparatus plays in advancing the narrative determines to what extent the image of actuality photographed is inflected with a moral character we call, after the French wartime experience of doubleness and ambiguity in the places of modernity, ‘noir’.
Carl Plantinga goes a great distance towards staking out the conceptual terrain of what constitutes a tonal ‘mood’, or what he calls an ‘affective character’, in film, art, and literature, taking Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) as his particular example in “Art Moods and Human Moods in Narrative Cinema” (2012).
Building on the work of Greg M. Smith, Plantinga argues that the plot-based ‘events’ in both literary and cinematic narratives (as, for instance, in both Highsmith’s and Hitchcock’s respective versions of Strangers on a Train) are clothed and cloaked in ‘an affective experience that permeates the fictional world of the work.’
Plantinga argues that this enveloping ‘mood’ of a given film ‘is something like its affective “character”,’ and that, to use his example, ‘[i]n Touch of Evil we could describe this [mood] as dark, foreboding, anxious, and unbalanced.’
As per Schrader’s iconographic summary of film noir stylistics, a preponderant percentage of scenes in Touch of Evil are shot in low light, at nighttime or in sombre interiors, with light sources stabbing stark rays into the frame from outré angles. Certainly, the baroque emphasis on the built environment of the Mexican border-town is given as much visual prominence as the actors. And, from the very first and famous shot crossing the frontier, Welles actively employs the cinematic apparatus to drive the moral tale he has to tell forward.
As Plantinga puts it, in a film noir like Touch of Evil (which he says is particularly effective at conveying its global mood of dread, anxiety and unbalance), the form of the film as much as its visual content is charged with an affective character whose essential qualia we might call ‘noir’.
… [T]he film noir may set the scene in a city late at night, the empty streets deserted and the rain falling, a few figures huddled in isolated doorways—all suggestive of darkness, wetness, coldness, and loneliness. On the soundtrack are the strains of melancholy music, together with the faint sounds of a quarreling couple in some nearby apartment.
—Carl Plantinga, “Art Moods and Narrative Moods in Narrative Cinema” (2012, p. 465)
In film noir, the visual ‘content’ of urban architectural forms—buildings, streets, doorways, apartments—undergo an epiphanic formal treatment. The qualities of darkness, emptiness, wetness, coldness and loneliness described by Plantinga in this imaginary example—not to mention the muted sound of anger—cloak the city in a shroud—but it’s a glamorous shroud.
In this epiphanic formal treatment, this intentional subjective inflection of visual content that carries no affective character in itself, the images of cities and the typical structures within them are glamorized by the cinematic apparatus, bringing out a supposed ‘poetic realism’ immanent in these objective structures, their implicit ‘photogénie’, their ‘sexy’ appeal to the camera’s non-intentional eye.
It’s arguable that what Frank was responding to in 1946 as a new realism in Hollywood crime dramas was in fact a ‘hyper-reality’ that the cinematic apparatus, with glamorizing intentionality, was painting on the banal visual content of actuality.
As I demonstrate in the video essay at the top of this post, somehow the hour of the day, the tightness of the aperture, the least inflection one can give to a photographed image of actuality in what was simply intended as a background for a Mexico City driving shot;—somehow all this plus the intrinsic, reductive beauty of black-and-white as an æsthetic limitation and inflection of reality works together to make even the most banal image of city streets and buildings ‘noir’.
On a personal note, your Melbourne Flâneur joined the new social medium AirChat this week and he’s loving it. Here’s a link to my feed:
I’ve been very resistant to social media and I’m typically glacial in the speed of my take-up when it comes to new technologies, but when I heard about AirChat, I jumped on it. After twenty years of standing on the sidelines watching the other kids play, I think this is social medium I’ve been waiting for.
So far, AirChat gives evidence of being the perfect social medium for a writer to rehearse his ideas in public. I’ve been putting the voice-to-text AI through its paces by reading aloud daily drafts of a new short story I’m working on, and as you can see in the quick and dirty video below, the AI accurately renders complex sentences featuring a technical vocabulary of architectural and mathematical terms which (according to the OED) are typically not among the most frequently used words in English.
Dean Kyte has joined AirChat and he thinks it’s going to be a game-changer for introverted writers seeking a viable social medium with which to communicate their words to a primarily oral, rather than literate, audience.
I also find that it copes with my slippages into French and Italian pretty well, often correcting itself when it mistakes a foreign word for one that sounds similar in English. It seems to search the Internet for self-corrections: in an exchange with Naval Ravikant where I invoked the name of Carlo Gozzi, the AI subsequently fixed up its initial misrendering of ‘gotsy’ based on the context of my voice note—what is called a ‘chit’ on AirChat.
In addition to giving the good folk on AirChat a daily earful of what I have been writing in the mornings, I’ve also posted a few random thoughts throughout the day based on the notes I’ve taken from my readings in researching this article.
So if you would like to interact with your Melbourne Flâneur, take vicarious, asynchronous part in my flâneries, or perhaps listen in or contribute yourself to some of the generative intellectual conversations that are happening on AirChat, I invite you to follow me @themelbflaneur.
In this prose poem from The Spleen of Melbourne, Dean Kyte takes a nostalgic flânerie up the so-called ‘Paris End’ of Melbourne’s Collins Street as he reminisces about his last night in the Ville Lumière.
‘The Paris End’:—it’s one of those magick phrases which evoke the sweet life of flâneurial streetlife for me. And whenever I treat myself to a flânerie up ‘the Paris End’ of Collins Street, like someone raising and lowering their shades, I shuffle the rosetinted souvenirs de Paris over les scènes melburniennes before my gaze.
When I saw the rougetainted Regent Theatre lit up to fête Moulin Rouge!, like le coup d’un souvenir enfoui, the farded façade dans la place Blanche floated up, suddenly unballasted, and I remembered standing on the little asphalt île de la place on my dernière nuit à Paris. Then I knew what the phrase ‘the Paris End’ meant to me; it meant ‘la fin de Paris’.
—Dean Kyte, “The Paris End”
Last Monday night as I was hiking up Foveaux Street to The Carrington Hotel (your Melbourne Flâneur’s Sydney ‘office’, his lubricated lieu de l’écriture in the barbarous Harbour City), puffing hard as I approached the lip of Riley Street, Conte before me glowing redly in the dusk, I realized with a thrill of satisfaction so rare in my life that my whole relationship with France and the French language has undergone a quantum change in the last two or three years.
As I laboured up the hill, in my mind’s eye I saw myself more than a year ago frequently taking this flânerie up Foveaux Street to The Carro, the 1,300-page Gallimard edition of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s complete Romans noirs cuddled to my breast.
In a moment of expensive madness I had acquired the Manchette for a portrait of Monash upon discovering Sydney’s Abbey’s Bookshop and its feast of foreign-language books on the first floor some months before. I knew nothing of M’sieu Manchette; I was literally judging this hundred-dollar book by its cover—a print, by Gérard Fromanger, of the Parisian café Le Paillard rendered in an inky blue with the red silhouettes of some hinky flâneurs fogging up the boulevard des Italiens before it.
Manchette, I suspected, would be un type sympa—or at least, he would be a writer sympathetic to my cause of a Melburnian literature flâneurially evocative of Paris, of the nouveau roman written under the guise of the roman noir.
My mission on those nights, as on this, was to enjoy a good dinner and a Guinness at The Carro, masticating my Manchette over my parma and pint, and then, my wits sufficiently elevated by the brew, to debrief my brains of the day’s doings in my journal.
And now as I was grappling up the escarpment of Foveaux Street over a year later, another wad of dough freshly blown on bloody French books from Abbey’s, the red neon and the green bricks of Conte burning provocatively—like the Negroni they serve there and the Absinthe they ought to—in the sympa Sydney dusk, that small, irrational feeling of bien-être the flâneur occasionally feels when there’s no objective reason for contentment with his ennuyé life now descended on me.
Ah! comme la vie est belle!
I’m not quite sure why Conte should bring this feeling of the flâneurial merveilleux out of me: Did it, in its ‘italienneté’, recall Fromanger’s depiction of the boulevard des Italiens on the cover of the Manchette?
Or, in its position à l’angle, on the plateau of Riley Street, ahead of me as I marched the martyrizing hill of Foveaux Street as I had once climbed steeper streets in Montmartre, throwing its deep red and green over the corner, did it recall to me my beloved Cépage Montmartrois, the ‘sein d’or’ whose catalyzing golden light upon the rue Caulaincourt I immortalized in my first book Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012), the golden bosom where I went to write every night in Paris over a demi de bière—indeed, where I learned this Parisian habitude, which has served me so well en Australie, of writing in bars and cafés?
Or was it simply that, one night, diverted from The Carro and into the boisterous bosom of Conte, I had, with my Manchette, sat at the bar, swooning over my Negroni and a piatto di prosciutto beneath the Italian movie posters, looking as keenly up at the red one-sheet for Blowup (1966) over the bar, hypnotized by it as if it were the movie itself?
Je ne sais pas.
What I know is that something has fundamentally changed for me in my relationship with France and its language during the last few years.
I’m hard pressed to put a date to it, and I only became conscious that a major phase shift had occurred in January this year, on my forty-first birthday, when I found myself sitting in Chloe’s Room, at Young & Jackson, arguably ‘the nation’s pub’, writing my first poem in French, moved by the French muse who holds court in this very Australian bar.
It’s a connection still very much buried to the eyes of my countrymen.
While the British colonial influence still lies on the surface of everyday life in Melbourne, with the lion and unicorn of the Royal Coat of Arms gracing everything from the portico of the Immigration Museum to the masthead of The Age, the French connection lies at a deeper, subtler stratum—deeper even than the Chinese, Greek and Italian influences on Melbourne life.
One has to dig back into the literature of the nineteenth century, when Paris was indisputably the capital of the civilized world, or the first half of the twentieth, when it was still coasting on a century of accumulated cultural prestige even after World War II, to perceive where and how Melbourne owes a subtle debt to French culture.
The clues to that subterranean French influence upon our civic life are buried in plain sight: they’re in the mansarded roofs of various town halls and the oblique allées of public gardens, the stone quays which pen the Yarra and the plane trees lining Collins Street.
Indeed, the eastern end of Collins Street, between Spring and Swanston, just barely retains into the twenty-first century its nineteenth-century designation as ‘the Paris End’, the prestigious address of doctors during the marvellous period, then, in the twentieth, with all the connotations of fashion that the magic name of Paris had conferred upon it, the favoured address of milliners, couturiers and cosmeticians.
Everyone important in the monde de la mode from Helena Rubinstein to Helmut Newton has either hung out their shingle or just plain hung out in ‘the Paris End’ of Collins Street, the most fashionable thoroughfare in this nation for nigh on two centuries.
To see these chthonic clues to the French influence upon our civic life, one has to have a constant eye to Paris: she must forever be in one’s consciousness, as she is in mine, for one to perceive these subtle analogies between the Mecca of modernity and her cultural colony at the nethermost ends of the earth.
Paris is always ‘devant mes yeux’, perhaps now more than she ever was, even when I was writing daily of my remembered experiences in her streets in Orpheid: L’Arrivée.
She has truly become the ‘moveable feast’ promised and prophesied by Hemingway as the eternal boon of the man lucky enough to have walked her streets, sat in her cafés, and loafed in her parks in his youth.
Doubtful that I will ever lay eyes again upon this city more beloved by me than any woman I have ever known, somehow the longer I have lived in exile from Paris in the country of my nativity, the more subtly French, the more subtly Parisian I have become.
It is a fact that certain writers and artists can live a very great deal on their memories, and in the exile of return to their homelands, the places of their actual experience are subtly, albeit marvellously transformed—as the façade of Conte momentarily was—by analogy with Paris.
Edward Hopper, for instance, though a painter, was no mean expert in French poetry, keeping abreast of literary developments in France even after he had ceased to go there for the living tutelage that the streets of Paris provide the artistic student of life.
Condemning himself to his native New York, Hopper had absorbed enough of the French spirit of life to infuse his visions of the local scene with some curious quality, apprehended at first as a weird novelty by his fellow countrymen, but later recognized as an authentic vision of American life in the first half of the twentieth century.
C’est très bien de copier ce qu’on voit, c’est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l’on ne voit plus que dans sa mémoire. C’est une transformation pendant laquelle l’ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c’est-à-dire le nécessaire. … Voilà pourquoi les tableaux faits de cette façon, par un homme ayant une mémoire cultivée, connaissant les maîtres et son métier, sont presque toujours des œuvres remarquables.
It’s all very well to copy what you can see, but it’s even better to draw what you can no longer see, except in memory. A transformation is worked upon the base material of actuality in which genius collaborates with recollection. You only reproduce what has struck you, which is to say, that which is essential to the image. … That is why paintings made in such a manner by a man with a cultivated memory, one who knows both the Old Masters and his trade, are almost always remarkable works.
—Edgar Degas (my translation)
Such artists hold themselves aloof from the circumambient culture of their countries and yet are more in the vital current of the nation’s life than their fellow countrymen, for the gift of the supple, subtle French language gives them an alternative grille through which to view the humdrum actuality before their eyes.
In the days when I wrote my first book, I did everything to keep myself insulated from the common life of Australia, to focus only on my memories of Paris, terrified that I would lose some detail which was, as Degas says, ‘essential to the image.’
Probably the work which marks the climax of my jeunesse, I still think Orpheid: L’Arrivée is a ‘remarkable’ tableau of the rue Caulaincourt in Degas’s sense, almost Rousseauian (by which I mean le Douanier, not Jean-Jacques) in the naïveté of its ‘weird novelty’, but I think the approach of hermetic insulation from the common life de l’Australie was wrong to take, though perhaps necessary and inevitable for a young man still learning his métier.
In those days, I needed my eyes and ears to be blindfolded and plugged against the actuality of my prosaic surroundings with media that reminded me of the poetry of my life in France. I couldn’t take on any new sensual experiences in these climes until I had gotten the results of the Parisian experiment in flânerie down on paper in a form I was substantially satisfied with.
But one grows, and the harder one works in youth to master the craft of writing, the more the RAM expands and the wider one’s capacities grow to register and retain those ‘essential traits’ of life which Degas says mark out the remarkable works of the artists of genius—for as Proust is at pains to impress upon us, the greater part of artistic genius lies in memory.
One is more able to take into oneself the poetic riches that lie in prosaic banality and the material conditions of one’s life are marvellously transformed by their analogy with the places and experiences of memory.
At mid-life, reconciled to my exile in the country of my birth, I now carry a bit of Paris, a morceau of its moveable feast, about with me as I sweep my fashionable path through Melbourne’s streets, unnoticed by my countrymen except as novel spectacle.
How do I do it? How do I subtly maintain the flâneurial ethos I acquired in Paris here en Australie?
The simple answer is the language, which provides me with a point of view, one of critical removal upon the currents of cultural life around me.
I think it’s fair to say that if one comes to a foreign language much beyond the age of easy acquisition in childhood, one will always be a ‘student’ of it to some extent, the more so if one comes to a foreign language in adulthood, as I did to French.
As Henry James—whose prodigious command of the language had been easily acquired in his Continental childhood—once wrote to a young French author, enjoining diligence upon him in his study of English: ‘One’s own language is one’s mother, but the language one adopts, as a career, as a study, is one’s wife, and it is with one’s wife that on se met en ménage [“one makes a common life”].’
I’ve been an earnest ‘student of French’ now for about two-fifths of my life, but it seems that at some point in the last few years, I became substantially less of a ‘student’ than I had been: having joined my life to the French language some quinzaine d’années ago, somehow my ‘wife’ and I have truly become one, body and soul, only lately in our marriage.
More than half my reading diet these days is composed of books in French, and when Abbey’s Bookshop isn’t getting a substantial tranche of cash out of me for crisp, virginal volumes like the Manchette, I’m on the hunt in thrift stores and secondhand bookshops for old books that have been passed around as once I prowled the booklined quays of Paris for saucy finds.
And just as, ‘in my day’, the bouquiniste on the quai des Célestins used to be a good place to go for a disreputable pute of a book, in Melbourne, if you like to get your tongue around a little French, certain lieux in the City of Yarra and the City of Darebin can be depended on to furnish an encounter with a vieille fille ‘on the shelf’.
Though I have largely given up the fetishistic desire which possessed me in my youth to acquire new books, I find at mid-life a resurgence in that desire when it comes to French literature: to have a naughty French novel in my satchel to whip out at an idle moment in my flâneries, to be able to momentarily set a bit of Paris before my eyes as I sit on Melbourne’s Metro, puts me simultaneously in the swim of two cultures.
To be able to excavate my copy of Camus’s L’Étranger (1942)—another Abbey’s trouvaille—from my Commie officer’s mapcase recently made the interminable trajet on the Lilydale line more bearable. At least I could fill the time by substituting Meursault’s ennui for my own.
Then too, in place of consuming much local media, I listen to a great deal of Radio France and watch French movies. I think I was partly inspired to write my first poem in French on my birthday after seeing Coup de chance (2023) at Palace Kino, in the Paris End.
Having failed to quite catch Woody Allen’s Whatever Works (2009) in Paris, posters for which frequently tantalized me in my flâneries through the Quartier latin, to immerse my eyes and ears in—of all improbable things—two of my favourite things in the world combined, a Woody Allen movie and a French film, probably helped to inspire me after a morning of frittering my fric away on Balzac, Chateaubriand and Adamov.
Listening to the world through the medium of a language where one is perpetually the amorous student is actually more fruitful for a writer than paying attention to his own media.
It is not merely that, in training the ear trumpet far afield and listening to what is going on in the Francophonic world, ignoring what is going on closer to hand in Australia, I hear a perspective on global events that is not parochially Anglocentric, but when I do happen to tune in to a few minutes of Australian media, I’m often surprised at the comparative puerility of what the media is propagandizing as ‘mainstream’ Australian culture.
The one exception to this is Australian cinema. I find I’ve been getting a lot of value lately out of revisiting the Aussie films I reviewed twenty years ago as a film critic on the Gold Coast, and this engagement with an aspect of our culture that has always struggled (under the Anglophonic imperium of Hollywood) to be ‘mainstream’—even domestically—supports my diet of French cinema.
In the interplay between French and Australian films, I find the questions I ask myself as a writer, with respect to literature, even more keenly put: Does Australia have a ‘national cinema’ that is equally an ‘art cinema’ the way that the French have a proud national cinematic tradition? Have we yet produced a stylistic storyteller who has written the national myth in images?
The films that represented us at Cannes in the years I was writing for magazines—the domestically decorated Somersault (2004), for instance—now seem to me interesting and instructive failures, fruitful clues for a writer and filmmaker embedded in the subterranean stream of his society and yet able, via the supple and subtle French language, to view the mainstream trends on the surface of Australian life with some critical distance.
In some significant sense, the prose poems of The Spleen of Melbourne project in their visual form, as hybrid Super 8 and video ‘cinepoems’ like “The Paris End”, constitute my own practical attempts to wrestle with those theoretic questions.
And what becomes clear to me as I begin to show and perform pieces from The Spleen of Melbourne is that, like the epiphany in Foveaux Street, what is felt by the flâneur walking the streets of this country as an inward experience of total sensual derangement à la Rimbaud is outwardly experienced by his fellow countrymen as ‘surrealism’: the supple and subtle French language putting a gloss of romance upon places familiar to Melburnians renders these recognizable places ‘new’ to their eyes.
Thus it is that I’m in the swim of two cultures at once. Becoming less of a student and more of a master of French in the last few years has allowed me to see a subterranean dimension of Australian life and bring it to the surface of my country’s vision.
And it could well be that, like Edward Hopper with respect to New York, in seeing what is quintessentially ‘Parisian’ about Melbourne, I am seeing something that was always there as a chthonic layer of our culture, but that only future eyes will recognize as an authentic vision of Australia’s present.
There are now nearly forty pieces in The Spleen of Melbourne project and I’m getting on towards the next iteration of the collection as a thematically navigable Blu-ray Disc of films and videos. You can support me in that endeavour by purchasing the soundtrack of “The Paris End” for $A2.00 below—or by naming your own price at the checkout, if you feel more generous.
The advantage is that by purchasing the soundtrack to the video, not only do you get access to unlimited streaming and/or high-quality download in your choice of audio format, but you can also opt in to become one of my fans on Bandcamp, where I occasionally post new pieces from The Spleen of Melbourne project which don’t have an audio or video component, as well as other photos and prose poems from my flâneries around this country exclusively for my fans on the Community tab.
A silent film at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney inspires a quick and dirty flâneurial video essay by Dean Kyte.
«Le spectacle n’est pas un ensemble d’images», notait Guy Debord en 1967, «mais un rapport social entre des personnes, médiatisé par des images». Un tel rapport social définit très précisement l’hysterie. C’est donc bien cette névrose généralisée qui caractérise la «société du spectacle». Le spectacle n’est pas «le capital à un tel degré d’accumulation qu’il devient image», c’est l’aliénation capitaliste devenue si générale et irrécusable qu’elle engendre une folie universelle. Le spectacle est l’aspect clinique de cette folie.
‘The spectacle is not an ensemble of images,’ Guy Debord would remark in 1967, ‘but a social relationship between people mediated by images.’ Hysteria is very precisely defined by just such a social relationship. It is therefore indeed this generalized neurosis which characterizes the society of the spectacle. The spectacle is not ‘capital accumulated to such a degree that is becomes image’, it’s the alienating effect of capital become so general and indisputable that it engenders a universal madness. The spectacle is the clinical aspect of this madness.
In my æsthetic philosophy of flânerie, by far the largest branch is given over to the constellation of networked problems that arise from the issue of modernity.
Flânerie is a strategy that certain rare, dandistic men will always choose for gracefully surviving modernity:—for the accoutrements of modernity are products of civilization, and the condition of ‘civilization’ itself is produced precisely by the accoutrements of modernity.
Le dandysme apparaît surtout aux époques transitoires où la démocratie n’est pas encore toutepuissante, où l’aristocratie n’est que partiellement chancelante et avilie. Dans le trouble de ces époques quelques hommes déclassés, dégoûtés, désœuvrés, mais tous riches de force native, peuvent concevoir le projet de fonder une espèce nouvelle d’aristocratie, d’autant plus difficile à rompre qu’elle sera basée sur les facultés les plus précieuses, les plus indestructibles, et sur les dons célestes que le travail et l’argent ne peuvent conférer. Le dandysme est le dernier éclat d’héroïsme dans les décadences…. Le dandysme est un soleil couchant ; comme l’astre qui décline, il est superbe, sans chaleur et plein de mélancolie. Mais, hélas ! la marée montante de la démocratie, qui envahit tout et qui nivelle tout, noie jour à jour ces derniers représentants de l’orgueil humain et verse des flots d’oubli sur les traces de ces prodigieux myrmidons.
Dandyism appears especially during those transitional periods when democracy is not yet omnipotent and aristocracy is only partially debased and tottering. In the strife of these periods, certain classless, idle men, fed up but all of them flush with native force, are capable of conceptualizing the plan for the foundation of a new type of aristocracy, all the more difficult to break since it will be based upon the most precious and indestructible faculties, and upon divine gifts that cannot be conferred by labour and lucre. Dandyism is the last spark of heroism in the age of decadence…. [It] is a setting sun: like the declining luminary, it is superb, without heat and full of melancholy. But, alas, the rising tide of democracy, which seeps into and levels everything, daily drowns these last representatives of human pride and pours upon the traces left by these prodigious Myrmidons a deluge of oblivion.
In his critique of the Paris Salon of 1846, Baudelaire ended his diatribe with a manifesto proclaiming the heroism of modern life, declaring that the dandy’s black frock coat, so abused by the literati of his day as ‘unpoetic’, was the armour that the modern cavalier must wear, bearing upon his thin, bowed shoulders ‘the symbol of a perpetual mourning’—a cross as potent as Parsifal’s.
‘Modernity’ is as much a myth as ‘antiquity’, and as Louis Aragon says in the preface of his surrealist classic Le Paysan de Paris (1926), for the dandistic, flâneurial poet, bopping about the city in his sensual derangement, a new mythology of our modern condition springs fruitfully up at every step.
I notice in my own case, starting now to give an occasional live recitation of pieces from The Spleen of Melbourne CD, that my surreally Parisian vision of Melbourne has for my fellow citizens something of this effect: places and names rendered banal by familiarity are suddenly seen anew through the prism of a poetic prose; and it may be that the heroism of the urban everyday, the ‘actless act’ of observant walking, the flâneur’s fashionable swagger through the suburbs, will one day be thought as heroic a processional as the Snowy horseman’s ride.
But the problems of modernity give way to those of post-modernity, which is both imminent threat and immanent opportunity.
This is the penultimate period of the Spenglerian decline, the democratic tide of decadence risen so high that only the stiffest necks can pretend it isn’t up to their chins.
In our times, those stiff-necked captives are the Baby-Boomers, children of a liberal, international rules-based order. And at the other end of the spectrum, the poor souls trying to breathe underwater, are the Zoomers.
Neither demographic, I contend, has any idea what is going on, and both, in the chauvinism of mutual ignorance, are vociferous in prescriptions downward and proscriptions upward.
The Boomers, being thoroughly analogue people, cannot imagine a mode of life that is thoroughly mediated by the digital spectacle, and the Zoomers, who have no living experience except of an existence thoroughly mediated by imaged surfaces, cannot imagine a halcyon, organic time that was not exclusively dictated by 1’s and 0’s.
Only Generation X and the older Millennials—those of us who gained our majority before September 11, 2001—are really in a position to survey the salience landscape of opportunity and threat with something like a clear-eyed assessment.
As the waters rise around us in the West, those of us born between, say, 1966 and 1983 stand with one foot planted in a living memory of where humanity has been—its analogue history—and one in an imagining of where it must evolve to—its digital future.
We’re not digital natives, more like émigrés from the analogue to this new salience landscape. We’re forty years and more wandering in the desert, somewhat adapted to life in these climes but with a living remembrance of ‘the Old Country’ behind us.
As splenetic and depressive a soul as Baudelaire, as thoroughly ennuyé with life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as he was with life in the nineteenth, and as one who, like Baudelaire, was utterly alone in decrying the bourgeois myth of progress, scuttling my whole future in the 1990’s to become (of all unremunerative things) a ‘writer’ when it was unfashionable to believe that the bottom would soon drop out of capitalism, democracy and modernity, I smile with benign contempt at the leprous grifters online who now making a living sounding the bell about the decline of the West.
It is only now, as they start to take on ballast with every breath, that they can taste the salt in the air.
I made a fatal choice that I wasn’t going to buy in to this bourgeois myth of modernity, but that a ‘New Myth’ of modernity did indeed need to be written;—and that it had to be written; that the old analogue craft of taking a pen in one’s hand and shaping a thought on paper that was eminently ‘functional’, fit for its purpose but elegant in its form, could not be superseded by plastic keys, digital screens and spellcheck.
I was one of the few who actually drew the line in the sand of technological convenience beyond which I refused to cross when the stakes were still low enough to be containable, and I have held the line implacably, foreseeing the moral cul de sac of Web 2.0.
As analogue people, the Boomers are enthused by this ‘brave new world’, seeing nothing but exhilarating opportunity in the digital, while, as digital natives, the Zoomers, living with the moral consequences of a reified spectacle, see nothing but nihilistic threat in the social networking affordances of Web 2.0.
And observing the hopelessness of the younger generation—these young folks who were born after a time when a moral calculation on the relative costs and benefits of technological, capitalistic modernity could be made, and who are thus in no way responsible for the place, underwater, where they find themselves—as I said to someone recently, it feels, as a Gen-X/Gen-Y cusper, that the fatal decision I made on the verge of my majority to stove in my boat and go down, to pursue humanity over technology whatever the personal cost, to be a writer rather than a technocrat, was a premonition of the Zoomers’ future.
What I chose as a poet-prophet of the present has been forced upon them as an inevitability, and as the tide rises, the decline’s coming for us all.
Quand le monde semble une prison et l’existence une impasse, quand la conscience se révolte contre le lieu qu’elle occupe, ou quand elle erre désorientée comme dans les pièges d’un labyrinthe, ça s’appelle la mélancolie. Sa victime entretient avec l’espace la plus douloureuse des relations ; elle en éprouve tantôt le manque, tantôt l’excès ; sa finitude lui fait horreur, de même que l’infinitude la terrifie. D’où la recherche mélacolique des ailleurs et des lontains : à l’égaré, le voyage promet un but, au captif une évasion. L’ancienne médecine le savait bien, qui aux malades de l’âme prescrivait de prendre la route — soit pour conquérir un horizon et sortir de leur marasme, soit pour imposer un rhythme aux fluctuations de leur inquiétude.
Le XIXe siècle, âge du spleen, est aussi l’âge des partances. La grande époque des là-bas. De Chateaubriand à Nerval, de Baudelaire à Maupassant, pas un écrivain (laissons de côté les «bourgeois», condamnés aux faux-semblants de leurs circuits touristiques) qui n’entende l’appel du large et n’y réponde à sa manière. L’un, parmi les bruyères de Bretagne ou dans les forêts d’Amérique, rêve de part et d’autre de l’océan aux espaces d’une autre vie…. Le second poursuit jusqu’au pied des Pyramides sa recherche des grands mystères. San quitter Paris, le poète des Fleurs du Mal s’en va … à la poursuite de son désir, ou plonge au fond de l’inconnu … vers la nouveauté d’un ailleurs. Et en 1889, n’en pouvant plus de voir la tour Eiffel confirmer le triomphe des mercantis, Maupassant fait voile vers la Sicile, avant de s’embarquer dans la démence. La puissante rêverie de l’exilé, et la pérégrination romantique vers les prestiges de l’Orient ; l’odyssée toute spirituelle du voyageur presque immobile, et la fuite écœurée loin du monde matérialiste : quatre modes d’évasion qu’a inventés le mal du siècle.
When the world seems like a prison and existence an impasse, when consciousness rebels against the site it inhabits, or when it wanders, disoriented, as if among the traps of a maze, we call this melancholy. Its victim maintains the most painful relationship with space; he feels sometimes the lack of it, sometimes the excess; its limits inspire horror in him just as its limitlessness terrifies him. From whence emerges the sad quest for ‘elsewheres’ and ‘other places’: to the lost, travel promises a goal, to the captive, an escape. Ancient medicine understood this condition well and prescribed the road to those sick at soul—whether to conquer an horizon and thus overcome their slump, or to impose a rhythm on the fluctuations of their anxiety.
The nineteenth century, ‘age of spleen’, is also the era of departures, the great period of going overseas. From Chateaubriand to Nerval, from Baudelaire to Maupassant, there is not a writer who does not hear the call of the open sea and respond to it in his own way—leaving to one side the ‘popular’ writers, condemned to the false pretenses of their touristic parcours. One, on the moors of Brittany or in the forests of America, dreams of the spaces of another life on both sides of the Atlantic…. The second pursues his search for the great mysteries to the foot of the Pyramids. Without leaving Paris, the poet of Les Fleurs du mal goes … after his desire or plunges to the depths of the unknown … towards the novelty of somewhere else. And in 1889, no longer able to stand the sight of the Eiffel Tower confirming the triumph of the moneylenders, Maupassant sets sail for Sicily before embarking for madness. The powerful dream of the exile and the romantic pilgrimage towards famous sites of the Orient; the entirely spiritual odyssey of the almost paralyzed traveler, and the revolted flight far from materialistic society: these are four plan of escape devised in response to the malaise of the century.
— Yves Hersant, preface to J.-K. Huysmans, Là-Bas (1985, pp. 7-8 [my translation])
Thus it is that in France, the nation that, through all its revolutionary social experiments with governance in the nineteenth century, sets the tone of modernity for the rest of the world, all serious writers feel a ‘fruitful despair’ and an urge to set off for ‘somewhere else’—materially different conditions of space and time that are, geographically and temporally, consubstantial with a new spirit of life, their own place and time being dead to them.
Over Easter, traditionally humanity’s solemn feast time for marking the annual cycle of descent and ascent, of death and resurrection, I found my eye caught by a provocative title on YouTube: “Why Young People Want to Die | Derrick Jensen Interview”.
As a survival of the nineteenth-century ‘age of spleen’ into twenty-first-century postmodernity, as the ‘down under’ interpreter of Baudelaire—as ‘là-bas’ – simultaneously, antipodally ‘down there’ and ‘over there’ – as Baudelaire could have wished to get!—your Melbourne Flâneur, trudging the camino of a city and a country in search of a better life than technological, capitalistic modernity has offered us, was sure to be attracted by such a wrist-slitting title!
Apparently Derrick Jensen is a writer. I don’t know Mr. Jensen or his work; I had never heard of him before my eye alighted on this video and have never read any of his books. But I liked the way he conducted himself in this interview and he spoke just as writer should do:—as the conscience—both in the English sense and in the French, as the ‘consciousness’—of his time.
When we hear so much unconsidered chatter on all forms of media, social and otherwise, polluting the sensemaking commons, it’s for those few of us who have mastered the human skills of the métier of writing—the abstract ability to rotate concepts in our mind as you can see Jensen do in this interview, and to consider the modular constructions that can be formed by words and ideas before he speaks—to guide the discourse, for we’re in the crow’s nest and can see both the Old Country behind us and the Promised Land before us.
I bring your particular attention to the section of the interview between 59:19 and 1:03:39 where Jensen talks about his introduction to Guy Debord’s concept of ‘la société du spectacle’. It’s a pretty graphic example, I warn you, but that’s to the point.
As Debord states and Jensen explains, in our addictive ‘mal du siècle’, addicted to a global spectacle composed of a mosaic of reified digital images which have colonized analogue reality, the images of human life must themselves become more graphic to deliver even a little hit.
But what is gained by the image’s graphicness comes at the cost of emotion, of connection, of relation to the real person behind the fake image.
Guy Debord, in the sixties, wrote about how if you take away relationship, the spectacle itself becomes boring. … [I]f you take emotion away from sex, if you take any connection whatsoever away from sex, it frankly can get kind of boring. And if it gets boring like that, you have to continue to increase the stimulus to make it so it doesn’t get boring.
— Derrick Jensen
When I heard Jensen’s explication of the spectacle, I was reminded of a quick and dirty video essay I made some time ago in Sydney—the one at the top of this post.
Wandering around the 20th-century galleries one rainy December day in the Art Gallery of NSW, I found myself attracted to an old silent short, “Toto exploite la curiosité” (1909) by Pathé Frères, playing in the Australian room, one of a number of early French films restored by the National Film and Sound Archive.
The plot is simple enough: A Parisian gamin finds a kaleidoscope lying in the street, picks it up and, as you can see in the video essay, just about goes into sugar shock as soon as he raises it to his eye to view the spectacle of coloured beads within.
Another gosse comes along, curious about the epileptic fit Toto is having in the street, and asks to have a look—with the same result.
Soon there’s a whole crowd of bons bourgeois gathered around Toto, who has had the bright idea of charging a fee to see the spectacle of the kaleidoscope, and almost as quickly, a riot breaks out at this nascent display of capitalistic enterprise, with even the gendarme who comes to restore order jockeying to get a look-see and just about fainting under the force of the spectacle.
What fascinated me were the hand-coloured inserts of the inside of the kaleidoscope, which look to be animated, though I’m not sure. It’s a sophisticated piece of early narrative filmmaking, and with nothing on me but my phone to record a swatch of it, as someone whose filmmaking and videographic style is heavily influenced by pre-Griffith silent cinema, I had to nab a couple of minutes of “Toto exploite la curiosité” as a kind of ‘visual note’ to myself on the level of sophistication it’s possible to achieve with an economy of technique.
But then too, I’m fascinated by kaleidoscopes which, as Toto’s exploitative brainwave shows, are the proto-cinematic spectacle par excellence. As David Thomson tells us in The Whole Equation (2005), whereas the Lumière brothers imagined the movies as a communal spectacle, a single screen we share in the dark, it was their competitor, the enterprising American Thomas Edison, who had the longer vision for the medium, imagining it not as one big screen, but as many small screens that every audience member could voyeuristically enjoy on his own, tuning in to the spectacle of his choice.
In essence, Edison imagined the kaleidoscopic spectacle of television, the personal computer, and even the smartphone.
So the kind of unconscious meta-referentiality in “Toto exploite la curiosité”—the fact that this short French film was in some sense using the kaleidoscope, an invention of the early nineteenth century, to predict, at the dawn of cinema, a spectacularly mercantile, American-inflected future for the medium it could not possibly have imagined—seemed to me a miraculous bit of cinema poetry, one that illustrated a quotation from my reading, an extract from French essayist Michel Bounan’s book La folle histoire du monde (The Mad History of the World).
Bounan, a doctor and friend of Guy Debord, is no longer with us, having died in 2019. This is unfortunate, as I would love to translate Bounan’s short, prophetic book, written in 2006, just before the big uptake in social media, and introduce his premonitory thoughts on the spectacular state of clinical hysteria and mass psychosis we now find ourselves in—and into which the Zoomers have been effectively born—to an Anglophonic audience.
Though he’s writing a whole decade before Brexit and Trump, and he never lived to see the Coronavirus, when I first read La folle histoire du monde mid-way through the pandemic, I was sure that Bounan was coyly referring to events across the Channel and across the Pond, that’s how prophetic his book seems.
And yet social media was not yet really ‘a thing’, as the kids say, when he was writing it.
In the citation I translate in the video essay, Bounan quotes Debord’s fourth thesis in La société du spectacle (1967)—that the spectacle itself is not simply an ensemble of images, but, as Jensen explains, it is a relationship between people that is mediated by images.
And as Debord, in his sidebar commentary on his own work, points out, this thesis is a paraphrase of Marx’s statement in Capital:—that capital itself is not an object, but a social relationship between people which establishes itself via the mediation of objects.
We see both these things demonstrated in the excerpt from “Toto exploite la curiosité”: It is the object of common curiosity, the kaleidoscope, that establishes and mediates the initial relationship between Toto and the other boy. Equally, it is the common object of curiosity, the spectacular object of the kaleidoscope, that mediates the entire social network that assembles on the street around Toto.
And furthermore, as Toto begins to charge the badauds for access to the spectacle secreted within the kaleidoscope (over which, through the law of ‘finders keepers’, he has sole propriety), it is both capital and the spectacle that objectively mediates the relationships of the society around him.
In essence, it is the ensemble of subjective images within the black box of the kaleidoscope that objectively dictates the formation of the social network, its relationship to itself, and its relationship to Toto.
What fascinates me about the kaleidoscope as a proto-cinematic device is that it is the perhaps only instrument of objective vision—quite unlike a telescope or microscope—that projects a purely subjective image. Looking into the black box of a kaleidoscope is like seeing pictures in the abstract shapes of clouds—while looking outward, you see a spectacle within yourself.
We’re now at a point in our evolution where the globe is like a giant mirror ball over which we have glued the tiny subjective screens of our narcissistic reflections projected through the spectacular, kaleidoscopic medium of the Internet. And we have two generations now who have been born into this reified world of digital surfaces applied contiguously over the organic, analogue reality which supports our life and relations with each other.
And that’s Bounan’s ‘universal madness’, the generalized hysteria illustrated in “Toto exploite la curiosité”, the hyper-stimulated relationships without emotion, without authentic human connection Derrick Jensen observes with sympathetic sadness in the young.
What would Philip Marlowe look like viewed through the lens of Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie? In this video essay, Dean Kyte experimentally subtitles a scene from Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake to find out.
‘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.’
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….
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’.
An amnesiac’s nightmarish return to consciousness coincides with the mood of one of Melbourne’s hidden laneways at night in this nouvelle démeublée noire from The Spleen of Melbourne project.
When I came to, I found myself in a black square. My head was ringing, but nothing shook loose.
I listened for a clue: The hour was so early that the gulls had drifted in to colonize the briefly abandoned city, and yet it was so late that even the last tram had retired.
I couldn’t shake that static. Then I realized it wasn’t in my head: I had tuned in to an empty channel.
Footsteps behind me—getting closer.
Were they coming to help or hurt me? To these and other questions I framed to myself—who? what? where? why?—my mind drew a blank.
Out here, inside myself, something shattered in a scream.
—Dean Kyte, “Kulinbulok Square”
No matter how intimately familiar you are with Melbourne’s Hoddle Grid, that geometric intersection of major thoroughfares and their accompanying ‘little streets’ still has the capacity to occasionally surprise you.
Every now and then in a flânerie through the city, confidently navigating by dead reckoning through laneways, backstreets, arcades and passageways as I traverse, at apparent random, the most disparate parts of the labyrinth, a new turning reveals a street as yet unmet with.
That was the case with Kulinbulok Square, a dog-leg turning off Queen Street, opposite the Queen Victoria Market carpark.
I’m not quite sure now what exactly I was up to when I captured the raw footage that forms the basis for today’s video on The Melbourne Flâneur vlog, whether I was on a mission to collect sound assets for my proposed podcast or simply laden with cameras and equipment on a late-night hunting expedition in search of ‘the wonder’.
In any event, what I do remember is that I was coming to the end of that late-night flânerie and was making my way back to The Miami Hotel—a bit ‘shagged and fagged’, as Alex DeLarge would have it. It was well-after midnight—after 1:00 a.m., even, in that privileged lacuna of time when, for a few brief hours in Melbourne, you cannot hear the music of the trams, their ghostly rumour, their squeals and chimes.
Footsore and fagged out, I was marching with the clack of my English heels up Queen Street as fast as the getaway sticks would carry me, heading for Victoria Street and bed, when a light and a street sign, a brick wall, steps and an aluminium handrail arrested me at the end of an alleyway I was surprised I hadn’t noticed before.
I had to stop and set up the camera for just one more shot of the night, for this was one of the images which speak to me, wordlessly, of ‘the Spleen of Melbourne’:—the place and the hour when the poetry of the city’s banal prose is marvellously manifest to the flâneur, his senses totally ‘dérèglé’ by the delirium of his dérive.
Bivouaced at Bacchus Marsh earlier this year, I returned to the footage nabbed that distant night, set sounds to it, listened intently, my Montblanc primed, with inward ears as a narration fitfully emerged from that totalizing cinematic image of night and light and 無, and the horror of consciousness—for with me, ‘the cinematic image’ lies even more in the world of sound—and in what is unseen, beyond the edges of the frame—than in anything I choose to shoot.
The prose piece that emerged, “Kulinbulok Square”, lies more on the fictional side of the prose poetry/fiction spectrum of The Spleen of Melbourne project, a deal closer to the nouvelles démeublées noires such as “Office at night” which constitute experimental previews for the fictional offshoot of that project, the proposed Melbourne Flâneur podcast.
Albeit, “Kulinbulok Square” is written in the first person, a pronominal point of view I absolutely eschew in the Jamesian/Robbe-Grilletian style of the nouvelle démeublée I’ve developed to tell the story of the podcast.
I was inspired initially by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s short story “Le chemin de retour”, the only story in his collection Instantanés (Snapshots, 1962) to use the first person.
In that story, written in 1954, three men (including the unnamed narrator) cross an isthmus connecting the mainland to a tiny island at low tide. One of the men, Legrand, wants to take a short, late-afternoon flânerie around the coast over the objections of Franz, who predicts they won’t be able to get back.
Sure enough, the tide rises and the three men find themselves trapped on the island.
The experiment for me in “Kulinbulok Square”, under the influence of Robbe-Grillet’s example, was to see to what extent the brutal chosiste style of the Nouveau Roman could be maintained in the first person and yet still suggest some of the pulpy generic tones of that pronominal perspective—the kind of voice we associate with Hammett at its most objective, and Chandler at its most subjective.
In other words, how much could one conceivably empty a personal account of any abstract reference to the ego, concentrating on the purely material facts of a place and a time, on physical sensations and only the most immediate inferences that a consciousness could make from them—as if the empty Kulinbulok Square of the footage were itself the character of the unfurnished short story?
Tricky task, and it took me more than six months to get the narration down to the blank but pregnant text of the video above.
“Le chemin de retour” was written at around the same time that Robbe-Grillet was working on his second published novel, Le Voyeur (The Voyeur, 1955), and as is often the case with Robbe-Grillet, the most explicitly ‘scientific’ of novelists, the literary ‘experiment’ of one piece of fiction directly influences another written during the same period of his development.
Le Voyeur is also about the flâneurial parcours of a small, unnamed island, and as in “Le chemin de retour”, the ‘intrigue’, from Robbe-Grillet’s perspective, is an abstract kind of suspense he develops purely from description as he builds up an extraordinarily detailed image of the island over the space of a few days.
In Le Voyeur, a door-to-door salesman, Mathias, returns to the isle of his birth on a desperate mission. When the narration takes him up, Mathias is about to step off the ferry between the isle and the unnamed port city on the mainland where he lives. It’s 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, and the ferry between the isle and the city operates twice a week.
If he doesn’t want to be stuck on his native isle until Friday, Mathias has exactly four hours and fifteen minutes to dispose of the ninety wristwatches in his mallette—(or 89 to be precise, for he has already sold one to a merchant sailor at the port)—among the approximately 200 inhabitants and be back at the quay by a quarter past four to catch the ferry back to the city.
It’s a matter of some urgency that he gets rid of all his merch today, for Mathias’s financial future, in the short term, depends upon it. He intends to rent a bicycle so as to facilitate his parcours around the island and speed up the disposal of the watches, but even then he knows, with a noirish fatality, that his mission is a bust:—It is mathematically impossible to sell 89 watches to the paysans of this impoverished backwater in just 375 minutes.
So Robbe-Grillet has kindly made of his novel a map and a timetable, providing us with spatiotemporal co-ordinates for every déplacement in Mathias’s itinerary around the island as prescribed by the forced time constraint of the ferry’s departure.
Every moment of his time on the island between 10:00 a.m. and 4:15 p.m. is theoretically accounted for, absorbed in the desperate division of time and motion in the exigencies of the boulot.
And with the incredibly detailed description of the island that Robbe-Grillet builds up as he moves Mathias around the map like a playing piece in a game of Cluedo, we build up a picture of the isle in our minds that is both geographical and topographical, such that we know the general relations between landmarks, routes, the township and various hamlets.
Robbe-Grillet asks us to pay much more attention than is customary in novels, to keep much more information in the buffer of our memory. His description is so detailed that we eventually know not only the layout of houses and shops on the island, but what is contained in closets of individual rooms. We even know what the contents of Mathias’s pockets are, and Robbe-Grillet asks us to bear in mind even what hand he is holding his mallette in from moment to moment.
What makes this strangely compelling is that, in the midst of his flat, inflected narration describing places, times and movements, Robbe-Grillet does something interesting: As we sum up all the data he is giving to us and redraw our mental map and schedule to accommodate the new information, we begin to note that there is a décalage—a gap, lag or lacuna—in the objective account of Mathias’s flânerie.
This gap seems to lie, temporally, somewhere in the region of 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., and spatially in an area of the island near the farm of Mathias’s old friends the Mareks and some rocky cliffs known to the locals as ‘le trou du Diable’—‘the Devil’s Hole’.
Meutre ou rapt, la situation de tout roman policier est un manque. Il s’agit donc non seulement de transformer l’énigme en récit, mais de circonscrire ce manque, et de le combler. De sorte que le travail de l’écriture et celui du détective sont une lutte contre le silence des objets et le mensonge ou mutisme des personnages.
Whether it is a murder or an abduction, the initial situation of all crime novels is an absence. It is thus a question not only of transforming the enigma into an account, but to circumscribe this absence and to fill it in, such that the work of writing and that of the detective are a struggle against the silence of objects and the characters’ lies or their refusals to speak.
In Le Voyeur, Robbe-Grillet continues his literary investigation of the generic crime novel as the paradigmatic form of the Nouveau Roman which he commenced with Les Gommes (1953), but whereas in the previous novel he took the primary viewpoint of the detective who becomes an unwitting criminal, in this one he takes the perspective of an ostensible criminal who plays detective.
Whereas Wallas in Les Gommes was a singularly ineffectual investigator who retreated into flânerie and consumerism to stave off the insoluble casse-tête of the boulot, Mathias is a ‘special agent’ of commerce who proves to be a singularly ineffective salesman, one who likewise retreats into the ‘enforced leisure’ of flânerie. And as he goes about the island ‘grilling’ les clilles, it gradually becomes clear that he is seeking to establish an alibi of some sort that fills in Boyer’s manque.
He is seeking, in other words, to ‘get his story straight’.
What Mathias’s story is exactly, Robbe-Grillet deftly avoids telling us, despite the sheer mass of objective evidence he piles up. ‘Un trou,’ as the narration ironically states late in the book, ‘demeurait toujours dans l’emploi du temps’—‘A hole would always remain in [Mathias’s] schedule.’
As Roland Barthes, a perspicacious early critic of Robbe-Grillet, would write in a contemporary analysis of the novel, all that can be said with certainty is that ‘the crime’ in Le Voyeur is ‘rien de plus qu’une faille de l’espace et du temps’—‘nothing more than a rupture in time and space’—since the island is nothing other than the physical mapping of a temporal parcours.
Barthes, who was an immensely sympathetic champion of what he called ‘la tentative Robbe-Grillet’—Robbe-Grillet’s ‘project’, but more in the sense of an ‘essay’ or ‘attempt’, an experiment that is not necessarily successful—was the first to perceive that the essence of the project lay in ‘spatializing’ time and ‘temporalizing’ space.
Robbe-Grillet donne à ses objets … une mutabilité dont le processus est invisible : un objet, décrit une première fois à un moment du continu romanesque, reparaît plus tard, muni d’une différence à peine perceptible. Cette différence est d’ordre spatial, situationnel (par exemple, ce qui était à droite, se trouve à gauche). Le temps déboîte l’espace et constitue l’objet comme une suite de tranches qui se recouvrent presque complètement les unes les autres : c’est dans ce « presque » spatial que gît la dimension temporelle de l’objet.
Robbe-Grillet gives his objects a mutability, the process of which is invisible: an object described for the first time at a given moment in the novelistic continuum reappears later furnished with a barely perceptible difference. That difference is of a spatial order, situational; for example, something that was on the right-hand side now finds itself on the left. Time dislocates space and builds up the object as if it were a series of slices, sections that cover one another almost perfectly;—but it’s in that spatial ‘almost’ where the temporal dimension of the object is found.
—Roland Barthes, “Littérature objective” (1954), in “Essais critiques” (1971, p. 35 [my translation])
What Barthes is describing here is a literary equivalent to cinematic montage—more specifically, a version of the ‘jump cut’ that, only a few years later, would become such a conspicuous feature of French Nouvelle Vague filmmaking—especially in the movies of Jean-Luc Godard.
It’s worth noting that Barthes goes on to compare Robbe-Grillet’s discreet, subtle, sectional, sequential treatment of objects in space to the motion of that proto-cinematic device, the magic lantern so beloved of that other novelist who took time as his field, Proust.
It becomes clear, then, according to Barthes, why Robbe-Grillet privileges the visual field exclusively in his writings: sight is the only sense that supports an entire field of subtle yet completed changes in the half-lives of objects:—‘l’homme ne participe jamais visuellement au processus interne d’une dégradation’—‘human beings never take part optically in this internal process of disintegration….’
In Le Voyeur, objects—the indices of ‘evidence’ in the conventional crime novel—mingle with the plot and even, as Barthes argues in the essay “Littérature littérale” (1955), confound themselves with it, overburden it with their sheer oppressive weight, and ultimately devour and destroy it.
Like the famous lead pipe, candlestick, wrench and rope of Cluedo—innocuous objects that, in the discordant context of ballroom, library, billiard room and conservatory, suddenly become surreally surcharged with a criminal significance—we have bonbons, a trio of cigarette butts that haven’t been smoked down quite enough, a length of lacy cord Mathias picks up on the ferry, and a blue cigarette packet.
Robbe-Grillet ‘scrubs’ these objects of any psychological or pathological significance. But their spatiotemporal co-ordination, the permutation of their arrangements in time and space as the narration revises Mathias’s story, gradually conditions the reader to hypothetically infer from their relations the probability of a crime that is never explicitly stated, as if—as Barthes suggests—the elided story of Le Voyeur, the tale that Robbe-Grillet declines to write, must pass through this indexical stratum of ‘things’ like a deductive exercise in pure Holmesian reason.
But, like the newfangled bike Mathias rents from the mechanic-tobacconist which is replete with ‘all the bells and whistles’, in this ‘dernier cri’ of the ‘New Novel’ the ‘typical adventure’ of the roman noir plot Robbe-Grillet appropriates for his experiment in Le Voyeur continually breaks down by the wayside and, as Boyer states, the stranded reader is continually left awaiting ‘un crime, un détective, une arrestation—qui ne viendront point’—‘a crime, a detective, an arrest—none of which will ever arrive.’
A bit like waiting for Godot.
In the end, Robbe-Grillet allows Mathias to ‘get away with it’; to get free and clear of the island of his birth and whatever he has done or dreamt that burdens him with such guilt that he has to fill in the manque of the missing space and time with an alibi that his accomplice—the plot itself—providentially assists him to construct.
For in thinking about the narrational structure of Le Voyeur, it becomes apparent that not only is the island a spatial metaphor for time, as in Barthes’ reading, but that there is a ‘topology’ of salience in how Robbe-Grillet structures the syuzhet of his fabula.
One can almost read Le Voyeur ‘barometrically’, as systems of pressure, or like a heat map where some central point of high salience remains red-hot but unstated, and on which the major structuring images throw some sidelight or oblique perspective.
Thus the central image of the novel is one that appears not during the elision, but before Mathias has even set foot on the island—before the narration has even picked him up that morning, and is retrospectively reported in the early pages of the book.
Mathias is obliged to get up very early to make his ferry, and with no bus available at that hour, he walks all the way from his apartment to the port.
A bit like myself when confronted with the unexpected apparition of Kulinbulok Square—or perhaps like the anonymous narrator of the ficción confronted with its wondrous horror—Mathias sees an image in the dawn that alarms and arouses him:
À cette heure matinale, le quartier Saint-Jacques était désert. En passant dans une petite rue, qu’il pensait être un raccourci, Mathias crut entendre une plainte, assez faible, mais semblant venir de si près qu’il tourna la tête. Il n’y avait personne à côté de lui ; la ruelle était aussi vide en arrière qu’en avant. Il allait poursuivre sa route, quand il perçut une second fois le même gémissement, très distinct, tout contre son oreille. À cet instant il remarqua la fenêtre d’un rez-de-chaussée — juste à porté de sa main droite — où brillait une lumière, quoiqu’il fît déjà grand jour et que la clarté du dehors ne pût être arrêtée par le simple rideau de voile qui pendait derrière les carreaux. La pièce, il est vrai, parassait plutôt vaste et son unique fenêtre était de proportions médiocres : un mètre de large, peut-être, et à peine plus de haut ; avec ses quatres vitres égales, presque carées, elle eût mieux convenu à une ferme qu’à cette immeuble citadin. Les plis du rideau emphêchaient de bien distinguer le mobilier, à l’intérieur. On voyait seulement ce que la lumière électrique éclairait avec intensité, au fond de la chambre : l’abat-jour tronconique de la lampe — une lampe de chevet — et la forme plus vague d’un lit bouleversé. Debout près du lit, légèrement penchée au-dessus, une silhouette masculine levait un bras vers le plafond.
Tout la scène demeurait immobile.Malgré l’allure inachevée de son geste, l’homme ne bougeait pas plus qu’une statue. Sous la lampe il y avait, posée sur la table de nuit, une petit objet rectangulaire de couleur bleue — qui devait être un paquet de cigarettes.
At that hour of the morning, the quartier Saint-Jacques was deserted. In passing through a backstreet he thought might be a shortcut, Mathias believed that he heard a cry, quite weak, but seeming to come from so near at hand that he turned his head. There was no one beside him; the alley was as empty behind him as it was before him. He was going to go on his way when he heard the same whimper a second time, very distinctly, right up against his ear. At that moment, he noticed the window of a ground-floor flat—just within reach of his right hand—in which a light was shining, even though it was already daylight and the brightness outside could not be blocked by the simple net curtain that was hanging behind the windowpanes. The room, it’s true, did appear quite vast, and its only window was of insufficient size—a metre wide perhaps, and a little more than a metre high. With its four equal, almost square panes, it would have better suited a farmhouse than this urban dwelling. The folds of the curtain prevented one from clearly making out the furnishings within. One could only see what the electric light was illuminating with intensity at the back of the room: the frustoconical shade of the lamp—a bedside lamp—and the more indistinct form of a bed torn to pieces. Standing near the bed, slightly bending over it, a masculine silhouette was raising an arm towards the ceiling.
The entire scene remained still. Despite the incompleted aspect of his gesture, the man was as unmoving as a statue. Beneath the lamp was placed, on the nightstand, a small rectangular object, blue in colour, which must have been a packet of cigarettes.
—Alain Robbe-Grillet, Le Voyeur (2013, pp. 30-1 [my translation])
One desperately wants to resist—as Robbe-Grillet would prefer us to resist—a Freudian interpretation of this image, but even if we put Freud firmly to one side and simply concentrate on it as a ‘cinematic’ image, this is the ‘primal scene’ of Le Voyeur, the ‘scene of the crime’.
As Boyer says, Robbe-Grillet has literalized the crime novel’s structural conceit, its necessity to have a secret at its heart which is hermetically closed upon itself—just as Mathias’s primal, voyeuristic vision is enclosed behind the obstructive architecture of the flat—one which it preserves for as long as possible—and for Le Voyeur, with its double 0’s which form figure 8’s, that is infinitely.
And one might say that Mathias’s recursion to this potently cinematic image throughout the book, embroidering or adumbrating it as the needs of the alibi demand, is a kind of ‘self-soothing mechanism’, a comforting scratching at a mental plaie which the return to the isle of his nativity represents for him.
The return to the isle marks a return to the primal scene of his birth after many years, although the primal scene in the quartier Saint-Jacques takes place, in Robbe-Grillet’s syuzhet, ahead of Mathias even setting foot on the quay. Thus, in its embroidery and adumbration, one is never sure how much of what passes across Mathias’s consciousness in the re-evocation of this pregnant image is a ‘screen memory’—not just in a Freudian sense of that term, but also in a filmic one.
What I suggest is that, in the narrational structuring of this novel, which lounges flâneurially coude-à-coude, côte-à-côte with Mathias, Robbe-Grillet takes an alternative approach to narration and perspective, one which is eminently more cinematic than literary.
The plot of Le Voyeur is structured as a group of open-ended, object-based ‘essential images’ which can be perceptually reinterpreted, and which form syntagmatic ‘chaînes de relation’ in their permutational arrangements.
Rather than a classical ‘stream of consciousness’ that owes its influence to Joyce or Woolf, Robbe-Grillet’s literary technique is more like a cinematic montage. There are transitions, jump cuts, flashes, dissolves between these essential images, grouped in syntagmatic chaînes which move us not only forward in time and space, through the parcours identified by Barthes, but laterally, diagonally, at right-angled jumps, like a chess piece.
With these movements around the Cluedo board of the island, Robbe-Grillet demands that we mentally reconstruct the space-time of the fabula in order to identify the co-ordinates of the lacunal blind-spot in the narration, its unwritten centre.
I use the word ‘narration’ here very specifically in place of the more conventional ‘narrative’.
A narrative is something told. It is a story ‘after the fact’, a reconstruction of events.
What I am suggesting is that the ‘narration’ of Le Voyeur is a kind of ‘storytelling machine’. It is very much ‘present tense’. It is an active machinery, a techne for the production of narrative similar to the ‘apparatus’ which Christian Metz identified as the sensemaking machinery of cinema.
More than the technical tools of camera and cutting table, there are whole systems of ideological construction which go into making meaningful narratives in the cinema, and this total ‘cinema-making device’ is the Metzian ‘apparatus’.
Likewise, the Robbe-Grilletian ‘narration’, I posit, is a literary machinery for meaning-making which is directly inspired by the techniques available to the cinematic apparatus.
In the section of his article “The Evolution of Narrative Viewpoint in Robbe-Grillet” (1967) dealing with Le Voyeur, Bruce Morrissette invokes a stereotypical ‘“style Robbe-Grillet” whose objects and other consistent elements (geometrical terms, scientific precisions, deceptive qualifiers, and the like) mark the general “manner” of the author … and are not a style specifically adapted to the character’s mentality.’
I’ll go further and positively state that the quintessential ‘style Robbe-Grillet’, under this specifically cinematic influence, is a ‘non-human regard’ of the phenomenal world such as the filmic apparatus affords us.
As Robert Hughes argues in The Shock of the New (1980), the conditions of the visual field, the ways we actually see under conditions of modernity, changed radically with the opening of the tour Eiffel in 1889.
Only a few balloonists had ever seen Paris from the air before then. ‘There were individual pilots who saw the sight from their planes,’ Hughes says, ‘but it was the Eiffel Tower that gave a mass audience a chance to see what you and I take for granted every time we fly: the earth on which we live seen flat, as pattern, from above.’
As Hughes goes on to argue, the techne of the tour marked a radical shift in human consciousness, a view of our world from a non-human perspective. While the Impressionists had started to break down the visual field into abstract patterns, the opening of the tour was the watershed for all the innovations in modern art which were to follow—including the invention of cinema six years later.
The literary style Robbe-Grillet, I suggest, is this non-human perspective on events from an elevation, howsoever slight, that reduces the human drama which the novel (as a human-allied techne) shows from eye-level, to an abstract pattern. When seen from an unconventional angle, all our pathetic dramas are reduced to flat patterns, to shapes and fields of force, to vectors of movement, as the earth is from the air.
In Le Voyeur, the narration marches alongside Mathias, tracking him like a dollying camera, but it also ‘looks down upon him’ slightly.
Le style narratif, ou point de vue, du récit, c’est—ostensiblement—la troisième personne conventionelle ; mais c’est une troisième personne qui se fond dans la ‘personnalité’ du protagoniste Mathias….
The narrative style, or point of view of the account, is—ostensibly—the conventional third person; but it is a third person that is based in the ‘personality’ of the protagonist Mathias….
While Morrissette identifies the ‘voyeur’ of the title with young Julien Marek, who believes that he sees Mathias behave suspiciously in the neighbourhood of the farm and the trou du Diable, as Robbe-Grillet will more explicitly demonstrate in his next novel, La Jalousie (1957), what might be termed the cinematic ‘regard caché’ Morrissette identifies with Julien ‘indique un centre de structure, un foyer de lignes de force’—‘indicates a structural centre, a common meeting point for vectors of tension….’
But while the voyeuristic, narrational third person is aligned (and allied) with Mathias’s perspective, in its foundation deep in his dissociated being, the ‘hidden watcher’ of Mathias’s incriminating behaviour is not really the super-egoic Julien—whose own motives and behaviours as reported through the third person account from Mathias’s POV are also troublingly illegible.
If we accept that the ostensibly ‘objective’ narration is aligned and allied with Mathias’s POV, and that the regard caché of the hidden watcher is both Julien watching Mathias and Mathias watching Julien, then we have a nexus of narrational ‘regards entremêlés’ altogether more confused than Morrissette’s account suggests, one which points towards the more radical experiment Robbe-Grillet will undertake in La Jalousie, where the singular narrative perspective is entirely elided as a lacunal negative space of positive structuring force.
I use the cinematic term ‘POV’ to describe the Robbe-Grilletian narration for, like the cold, inhuman eye of the camera, this overhead view or unconventional angle on human behaviour which emphasizes the formal geometry of objective relationships as compositional arrangements is a ‘mobile regard’ uncoupled from the human angle of view.
Although it is aligned and allied to Mathias’s perspective, marching alongside him, the Robbe-Grilletian narration is as glidingly inhuman in its tracking gait as the dollying, booming camera we will later see the auteur avail himself of as a descriptive device in L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) and L’Immortelle (1963).
So who then is the narrator and who is the voyeur of Le Voyeur?
Milat provides a persuasive ‘family tree’ for the characters of Le Voyeur. According to the Milatian reading, the principal characters such as Julien Marek are actually aspects of Mathias himself. But more than this, even the secondary masculine characters, like the bizarre mechanic-tobacconist or the menacing patron of the café, are distorted versions of Mathias.
While it is obviously the case to the reader that the precociously amorous gosse Jacqueline, that môme with ‘le démon au corps’, is a younger version of her mother, Mathias’s boyhood crush Violette, Milat argues that even female characters like Mme. et Mlle. Leduc have their origin in Mathias’s being as phantasies he tortures himself with just as much as Julien, whose ‘chastising regard’ is a super-egoic check to his libidinous id.
In Milat’s view, all these judgmental external regards which look down on Mathias, these lines of perspectival force which look inward on him, searching his soul and provoking him to lie about his suspicious behaviour, actually come out of Mathias himself.
Thus, Morrissette’s ‘conventional’ third person is complicated by Milat’s pseudo-Freudian ‘condensation’ of characters—both male and female—who have their common root in the superficially unprepossessing Mathias’s surprisingly rich ‘personality’.
Valerie Minogue goes even further. While Milat argues that all the characters surrounding Mathias emerge as distorted, phantasmal aspects of himself, in her article “The creator’s game: Some reflections on Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur” (1977), Minogue situates Mathias’s dissociated, externalized perspective on himself in Robbe-Grillet’s consciousness.
Thus, while the characters he meets and interacts with are externalized projections of Mathias, Mathias is an externalized projection of Robbe-Grillet.
But for Minogue, Mathias, dissociated as he is, is afforded a degree of quasi-autonomy by Robbe-Grillet—like a ‘handicap’; for in her reading of the novel, author and protagonist are locked in a brutal competition.
The supposed lacunal crime that is so terrible that the supposedly objective narration dares not even write it in Le Voyeur has its primal origin in the manque of Robbe-Grillet himself, and the author is as determined to ‘pin the rap’ for his dissociated phantasies on Mathias as Mathias is determined to slip out of the incriminating net that Robbe-Grillet’s text weaves around him.
The rules of the creator’s game, as played by Robbe-Grillet, seem to demand a constant challenging of the creator’s moves. The protagonist himself, as an extension of the creator, is used as a vehicle to question the plausibility, and, above all, the innocence of the text, and thus denounce the creator’s game.
Once he’s achieved his ‘literary destiny’, Minogue says, once Robbe-Grillet has successfully ‘framed’ Mathias, the auteur treats his defeated mannikin generously, indulgently, and, like a good sport, ‘lets him off the hook,’ allowing him to get off the island without anyone—except Julien Marek—suspecting what’s he’s been up to there.
Thus, as both Minogue and Kathy Phillips observe, in Robbe-Grillet’s literary investigation of the generic crime novel, it is language itself that first alerts us to the discrepancies in the ostensibly ‘objective’ account of Mathias’s story.
The very title is a clue. In Le Voyeur, when Robbe-Grillet declines to refer to Mathias by name, he always calls him ‘le voyageur’—‘the traveler’, in reference to his job as a commercial traveler, not ‘le voyeur’. That word never appears in the text.
The gommage of the middle syllable of voyageur, the telling erasure that contracts Mathias’s official designation as traveler and makes him synonymous with the hidden regard of the narrational watcher, is repeated as slippages throughout the text, the most damning of which, as Phillips observes, is the conflation of ‘ficelle’ (cord) with ‘fille’ (girl).
Thus, if we take all these perspectives on and readings of Le Voyeur, we see a triple recursion: Every character Mathias meets with in the novel emerges ex nihilo from himself, and he in turn emerges ex nihilo out of the blank void of Robbe-Grillet.
It is the dissociated narration, the objectivizing and externalizing of his own pathologies by Robbe-Grillet himself wherein the cinematic voyeur hides.
What I have called the ‘regard caché’, the ‘hidden watcher’, is nothing less than the narration itself, the machinal apparatus of this objectified phantasy as Robbe-Grillet takes a cold, hard, clinical look at himself, stalking himself like a camera and constructing, like a montage, in an illusion of ‘continuity editing’, his denial of sado-erotic desires in this book that he will later go on to declaim in future novels and films without alibi or exculpation.
It’s a salutary exercise, both literary and auto-psychological.
Le Voyeur seems to me to be the first book in which a mass of words have been assembled to say as close to nothing as is humanly possible in a novel.
The ‘adventure in reading’ which Le Voyeur represents involves us assisting as spectators at Robbe-Grillet’s assiduous building up of words on a blank page, a voyeuristic audience, through this cinematic narration, to the bravura performance of the auteur constructing his own alibi.
Like watching a building going up, implicated in the alibi-lie, we avidly observe from the shadows, riveted with suspense, as this brutal writer erects a complicated échafaudage, a screen, a veil, a bâche of noisy blankness over the void of the white page. Is this magician walking the cliffs of his virtual isle going to make a wrong move?
The story that emerges from the brutal machinery of the Robbe-Grilletian narration, the ‘intrigue’ of the author’s stabbing self-regard, is never positively stated, merely implied by blank negation—or rather is inferred by the reader as a novel that remains beautifully unwritten for all the ‘là-ness’ of the words Robbe-Grillet actually puts on the page.
The artifactual book, the ‘unwritten novel’ of Le Voyeur, is ultimately a collation of densely blank pages on which Robbe-Grillet has assiduously scrivened nothing—a fiction of nothing which nevertheless imposes itself forcefully on our minds as a concrete fact.
The experiment, though doomed to be unsuccessful by the impossibly rigorous standards of his own tentative, is a magnificent effort, and Robbe-Grillet’s failed experiments as a writer are far more interesting than the conventional successes of any other novelist.
If you found this analysis valuable, I encourage you to help me to write more deep dives into French literature by purchasing the audio track below.
For $A2.00 you can follow me on Bandcamp, where I regularly release the soundtracks of my videos and films as stand-alone ficciones. I also post exclusive flâneurial content for my followers on the Community tab, including other microficciones adjacent to forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast, so drop due dollari on “Kulinbulok Square” and follow me today.
I admit it’s a bit unorthodox to release the single after you put out the album, but you know the Aquarian contrariety of your Melbourne Flâneur by now, chers lecteurs: Whatever the masses are doing, I’ve got to do the opposite.
But, more seriously, I could not have predicted beforehand that, of all the tracks on The Spleen of Melbourne CD, “Office at night” was going to be the one that would intrigue listeners on Bandcamp the most.
On the spectrum between ‘prose poetry’ and ‘fiction’, “Office at night” represents the most extreme pole of the latter on the album.
As an experimental preview for the forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast, written in the Jamesian/Robbe-Grilletian style I call the ‘nouvelle démeublée noire’, I regard it as by far the most merciless application of the style featured on the CD, so I’m very surprised indeed to discover that this track, freezingly cold in its literary voice and brutally ‘objective’ in its treatment of the main character, the anonymous bald, stocky man in the window, should have proved to be so popular with listeners.
In light of its popularity over the last couple of years, I thought that “Office at night” deserved to be released as a single in its own right.
And remembering my misspent teenagerdom as a collector of CDs, I decided to ‘go a bit nineties’ and press it out as a CD single. (I know everyone reading this is old enough to remember what those are.)
The CD, packaging, and booklet are designed by Dean Kyte and feature his photographs shot on Kodak film.
The gang at Implant Media did a great job once again on helping me to realize my vision for the artifact.
Although I couldn’t achieve my initial nineties vision of presenting the CD single in one of those slim plastic J-card jewel cases you’ll remember, I think the glossy card-sleeve is actually a great compromise—one which better complements The Spleen of Melbourne CD, but which also, from a graphic design perspective, better complements the nineties vision I had for this product as a lightweight, portable, low-cost introduction to the fictional side of my literary œuvre on contemporary Melbourne life.
Slimmer than a book, and arguably more interactive than one, quickly consumable yet eminently collectable, I think the card-sleeve format has a certain funky, retro, analogue/digital cachet, as the CD singles of the nineties did. And the “Office at night” single is further enhanced by a four-page glossy sleeve booklet—an added luxury no single I ever bought in the nineties sprang to.
The nineties CD single was a subcultural artifact you could palm discreetly to a mate as a ‘gateway drug’ to a new musical experience, or press, as a volunteer evangelist for an underground band, on a new adherent you were sure ought to be ‘in the know’ of the Fitzroy/Fortitude Valley/Kings Cross scene.
And it’s in that spirit of underground, networkcentric distributivity that the “Office at night” CD single was conceived.
But the CD single was also an analogue/digital artifact that emerged as a transitional media technology during that golden decade which had one foot in the near-past of the vinyl record and one in the near-future of the infinite iPod. It’s an analogue object which records digital music—quite a steampunk little dingus when you think about it.
And with its blend of analogue tangibility and digital abstraction, the CD single is a neat conceptual fit for the bespoke, artisanal methodology which underlies the brand promise of all the books, eBooks, and audiobooks I publish under my own imprint through my Artisanal Desktop Publishing process.
As with The Spleen of Melbourne CD, all the photographs illustrating the “Office at night” single, including the one above which inspired the A-side, are examples of my analogue street photography of Melbourne, shot on Kodak film. In fact, the physical CD itself is designed to form a close-up iris shot, as if you’re sighting through the lens of a camera, of the bald, stocky man on the first floor of Block Court.
The graphic design of the CD itself gives a physical form to the central image of the short story on it.
So you can see how the analogue/digital interface works in the graphic design of the artifact: The analogue photo I took of the bald man is the ‘essential image’ that inspired me to write the story—and it’s that story you’re listening to in the abstract, conceptual, three-dimensional space of the sound world on the CD.
And yet the actual artifact of the CD, its ‘object quality’ as a flat, circular, very nearly two-dimensional design space, replicates as a tangible analogy the hidden perspective revealed at the end of the short story—the ‘plot twist’ which is the key to the enigmatic mystery, the ‘game of perspectives’ that listeners on Bandcamp have found so intriguing about “Office at night”.
Having come of age in the nineties, and working, as a writer, in one of the most analogue artistic media it’s possible to practise, I’m a hawkish chauvinist for analogue culture. And yet, straddling that millennial divide, I actually think there needs to be a practical reconciliation between analogue and digital media, that the digital needs to be ‘incarnated’, ‘embodied’ in some kind of tangible physical form for these abstract bits of data to become ‘real’, as cultural products, to us as human beings.
And in many ways, as a border-dwelling millennial literary artist who comes down hard on the side of analogue, but who has been forced by his semi-nativity to immigrate into—and adapt to—a digital world he regards with scepticism and suspicion, I see myself as a kind of bridgehead to that reconciliation, a new cultural order of life, an incarnated ‘analogue digitality’.
Perhaps more than any other writer working in Australia today, I’m quite sure that I define the term ‘avant-garde’: As a flâneurial writer, an undercover résistant to technological, capitalistic (post)modernity whose literary practice is directly inspired by his idle ambulations around the cities and towns of this country, I’m working at the edge of something that is mysterious even to me.
The two main ficciones on the single, “Office at night” and “The Trade”, deal with this numinous mystery in hard, pragmatic terms.
They’re examples of what I call ‘literary crime fiction’—literary fiction, – fiction, that is, that deals with human beings, with their psychological behaviour and interactions, – from which the melodramatic tropes of generic crime fiction have been largely erased, but which leave their vestigial traces as a ‘felt mood of mystery’, an ambiguous ambiance of vague yet realistic intrigue.
The inferior novelist tends to be preoccupied with plot; to the superior novelist the convolutions of the human personality, under the stress of artfully selected experience, are the chief fascination. Without character it was once accepted that there could be no fiction. In the period since World War II, the creators of what has come to be called the French nouveau roman (i.e., new novel) have deliberately demoted the human element, claiming the right of objects and processes to the writer’s and reader’s prior attention. Thus, in books termed chosiste (literally “thing-ist”), they make the furniture of a room more important than its human incumbents. This may be seen as a transitory protest against the long predominance of character in the novel, but, even on the popular level, there have been indications that readers can be held by things as much as by characters…. The popularity of much undistinguished but popular fiction has nothing to do with its wooden characters; it is machines, procedures, organizations that draw the reader. The success of Ian Fleming’s British spy stories in the 1960s had much to do with their hero, James Bond’s[,] car, gun, and preferred way of mixing a martini.
As I said in my recent post on Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes, I also call this style, written under the influence of the French nouveau roman, the ‘nouvelle démeublée noire’—the ‘unfurnished dark short story’.
As an offshoot of The Spleen of Melbourne project, the short stories on the “Office at night” single deal with characters, locales and situations in a more explicitly fictional—as opposed to poetic—story-world that has organically emerged from the prose poems, and which forms the basis for the episodic narrative proposed in the projected Melbourne Flâneur podcast.
“Office at night”, for instance, is an ‘interstitial episode’ in that narrative, taking place halfway along the storyline, while “The Trade” is ‘adjacent to’ the narrative, referencing a major supporting character who steps out of the background to play a leading rôle in “Dreidel”, one of the other ficciones on The Spleen of Melbourne CD.
The literary style of these ficciones is much harder-edged, much less romantic in its vision than the ‘softer’, ‘more human’—‘more feminine’, even—style of the prose poems. In their hard-edged, more masculine and pragmatic style, they owe something to generic crime fiction in the hardboiled pulp style, but much more to French crime fiction, and even more still to the French nouveau roman.
And I’ve noticed that the audience for these ficciones which cast oblique and intriguing side-lights on what is now a very dense and precise story-world that has emerged organically in my mind over the past three years—a purely internal, fictional Melbourne of people, places and events that maps in incredible detail to the external, actual Melbourne we all know—is largely men.
While female listeners appear to prefer the ‘softer’, more romantic treatment I give the city in my prose poetry, male listeners have shown a preference for the brutally ‘objective’ style of literary crime ficciones such as “Office at night” and “The Trade”, these so-called nouvelles démeublées noires which ‘objectify’ their characters, treating them ruthlessly as ‘things’ in a world of yet more things.
I’ve been gratified to discover through my on-going market testing for this podcast that, although I have consciously removed and erased almost all the generic tropes of popular crime fiction, leaving only their traces as a felt sense of unease and ambiguity, a lot of people who have either listened to these tracks on Bandcamp or have heard me read the ficciones aloud in live performance—particularly men of my own age and older—have sensed the ‘density’ of this larger narrative they can only grasp obliquely in these interstitial and adjacent fragments.
They can sense that, like an iceberg, there is a significant and detailed story-world, one that maps accurately to the objective actuality of Melbourne, in back of these mysterious and intriguing ‘shards’ of a story—precise details I am choosing not to furnish the listeners with in the text, but whose presence they can feel.
So the “Office at night” CD single is not only a low-investment introduction to one end of my literary œuvre as represented on The Spleen of Melbourne CD, but it’s also an entry-level introduction into the dense and detailed story-world I’m building for the forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast.
I’d also like to build the prospective audience for that serial, so to inaugurate the release of the “Office at night” single, I’m offering a special Christmas deal for the next two months: If you’re looking for a unique Christmas gift for someone you feel would be intrigued to enter my world, my dark and surreally Parisian Melbourne, I’d like you to introduce them to my writing.
Using the sales form below, you can purchase a copy of the “Office at night” single together with a copy of The Spleen of Melbourne CD and save 25% off the album’s usual price.
Keep one for yourself and give the other away to a friend who you think would be a ‘good fit’ for my style. Do me a favour and press me, like a secret handshake, into the palm of someone you think will be intrigued by my æsthetic philosophy of flânerie and help me to build a prospective audience for the larger narrative of which “Office at night” and “The Trade” are mere tasters.
Of course, all my products come autographed and wax-sealed as a mark and a guarantee of their artistic authenticity, so whichever CD you keep and whichever one you give away, there’s some added artisanal value attached to the artifact for both you and your mate: You’re getting something that comes directly from the author’s hand, but, more crucially, the entire tangible artifact you’re holding is a palpable realization of my inner vision:—it’s leapt directly from my brain to my hand and into yours.
Plus, of course, every CD I sell comes personally gift-wrapped in suitably Melbourne-centric apparel for an unparalleled unboxing experience.
“Office at night” [CD single]
Personally signed, sealed and gift-wrapped by the author. Price includes postage. Purchase the physical CD and get bonus MP3 versions of all the tracks absolutely free!
A$18.45
“Office at night” [MP3 single]
Get the main story plus 2 bonus B-sides and a 4-page PDF booklet featuring Dean Kyte’s noirish Melbourne street photography! Worldwide delivery within 24 hours.
A$4.95
“Office at night” and “The Spleen of Melbourne” [2 CD combo]
Buy the “Office at night” single and get 25% off “The Spleen of Melbourne” album! Price includes postage. Each CD comes personally signed, sealed and gift-wrapped by the author.
Dean Kyte adapts some of the sound cues from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) into a poetic new soundscape for Melbourne’s Docklands.
In watching Rear Window (1954) again after several years, I was surprised to discover that the film could conceivably be regarded as an example of what I have called ‘flâneurial cinema’.
I say that I am ‘surprised’ to have made this retrospective discovery about a film I know so well because Alfred Hitchcock is not a director I naturally class among the colleagues I claim as part of a movement, the name of which I have all but invented to describe a tendency among certain cinéastes to take a more exploratory approach to our art-form.
Despite being one of the most masterful manipulators of the incurious and unreflecting assumptions of commercial cinema, Hitchcock is an experimental filmmaker au cœur—one who continually questions the commercial assumptions of cinematic form; one who continually renovates himself, setting himself new æsthetic experiments with form to explore in each new film; and in that narrow regard he makes a sally into one of the domains I claim as the natural territory of a ‘flâneurial cinema’, the inquisitive conceptual space of the experimental film.
As Evelyn Kreutzer recently showed with her video essay “Footsteps” (2022), there are essays in flâneurism chez Hitchcock—examples of those ‘moments privilégiés’ where his movies briefly respire in the spectacular ‘wonder’ of cinematic mundanity, but rarely is the conceptual architecture of his films constructed on the basis of a thoroughgoing flâneurial investigation of the plastic potentialities of cinematic form.
And curiously, in thinking back on Hitchcock’s œuvre, it stands out to me in retrospect that those films he made with James Stewart—Rope (1948), Rear Window, and Vertigo (1958)—seem to be the movies where he takes the most overtly flâneurial attitude of exploration and experimentation towards film form.
As Richard Corliss said in his Time obituary for the actor back in 1997, James Stewart represented for Alfred Hitchcock a kind of ‘pedestrian everyman’—a voyeur who finds himself lured by an oasis of glittering evil that lies just beyond his reach.
Flânerie is an amoral æsthetic activity which privileges the scopic sense, and thus its relationship with both voyeurism and the cinema is implied. The reason, perhaps, that Rope, Rear Window, and Vertigo elicit from Hitchcock his most thoroughgoing flâneurial inquisitions, investigations, explorations and experimentations into the possibilities and potentialities of cinematic form is that something archetypal in the actor himself evoked a flâneurial response in Hitchcock that critics have not yet noticed.
What I am suggesting is that beneath the veneer of intrinsic ‘goodness’ chez Stewart, there is a free-floating, drifting, dynamically bending, corruptible stance that well represents the ‘un-engagé’ nature of modern man in the morally bankrupt twentieth century.
From the pick-and-mix drawing-room intellectual of Rope who ‘samples’ the philosophy of Nietzsche without committing himself to the absolute moral consequences of it, to Scottie Ferguson, the most overtly flâneurial of Hitchcock’s characters in his most obviously flâneurial film, Stewart, the ‘impotent observer’ who finds himself ‘morally seduced’ by the visions his wandering male gaze meets with, is an actor uniquely aligned to the conceptual and mechanical apparatus of Hitchcock’s cinema—the place where the director’s æsthetic theory of cinema meets the technical practice of it.
In his analysis of the film in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976), Donald Spoto argues for Rear Window as Hitchcock’s ‘testament film’: it is a kind of analogy for itself, showing us not only how a Hitchcock movie is made, but, more crucially, how it should be watched.
In Spoto’s view, Stewart’s ‘Jeff’ becomes ‘Hitch’; his apartment is the cinema, his rear window the screen on which the director’s voyeuristic visual pleasures are played out. More vulgarly, Jeffries’ immobilizing broken leg, which renders him impotent to take a more active flâneurial rôle in the drama, might be read as Hitchcock’s girth, of which the director was acutely sensitive, and which condemned him, in his own view, to be an armchair observer of life.
Thus, when Jeff sends Lisa (Grace Kelly) ‘onto the scene’ of this immense dollhouse Hitchcock constructed to avoid all the ennui he felt about going on location, Stewart is, in a sense, ‘directing’ Her Serene Highness on this screen of scopic pleasure which Hitchcock has built as a proscenium to ‘grace’ the most beautiful doll in his dollhouse.
Then too, the three-shot structure that governs the film’s sensemaking apparatus—close-up of Stewart looking at something; insert of what he’s looking at from a position aligned to his point of view; close-up of his reaction—is the fundamental syntagm of HItchcock’s cinema.
As elegantly simple as this visual syntax is, in Rear Window it shows itself to be supremely flexible at conveying a wide range of emotionally intoned meanings. The three-shot syntagm shows us not only how Hitchcock constructs his emotional effects, but tells us how we should watch his movies so as to inferentially derive meaning from them.
And as a visual dialect, an æsthetic theory of sensemaking that Hitchcock consistently applies practically in his cinema, this syntagmatic structure in Rear Window perhaps tells us better in than any other film how Hitchcock himself typically viewed the world.
Given that I propose flâneurial cinema as a reel investigation du réel, the experimental nature of the flâneurial cinematic inquiry in Rear Window, where the overtly artificial studio becomes a kind of ‘lab’ for research into the plastic potentialities of cinematic form, would appear problematic because in this film Hitchcock eschews location shooting with far more than his usual violence.
But, paradoxically, the film is flâneurial in its domesticity, and in Rear Window, the camera, as the fundamental tool of cinematic recherche, takes an extended ‘voyage autour de ma chambre’:—for the private domestic space of L.B. Jeffries’ Greenwich Village apartment exerts a ‘sphere of influence’, arrogating the courtyard behind the eponymous ‘rear window’ to itself.
For the private individual, the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work. The former constitutes itself as the interior. Its complement is the office. The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions…. From [the exclusion of commercial and social considerations] arise the phantasmagorias of the interior—which, for the private man, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far way and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theatre of the world.
The courtyard becomes ‘interiorized’ so as to become ‘domesticated’ by the flâneurial regard of Jeffries in the same way that the Parisian flâneur annexes the local park to his private chambre as a Le Nôtrean ‘salle’—a communal, outdoor ‘living room’ where one feels strangely closeted to carry on in public some of the activities—reading, drinking beer, watching the folks ‘across the way’—that might typically be regarded as private or ‘indoor’ activities.
It’s worth noting how little of Jeffries‘ apartment Hitchcock actually shows us: we see only the central living space clearly. We get oblique glimpses of the kitchen area and bathroom, but the angle of regard is principally turned outward: as the credits demonstrate with their bookended raising and lowering of the shades over the rear window, we are in a private loge at the theatre, and as in the theatre, public spectacle is private entertainment for the flâneur.
Thus Hitchcock achieves a remarkable sense of ‘intimacy’ through the truncated set design of the apartment in Rear Window: just as the flâneur finds his home in the crowd, the real ‘inside’ of Jeffries’ domestic life is ‘out there’ in the ‘secret, private world’ of the public courtyard.
In this restriction of regard, of scopic access to Jeffries’ actual living space, the film produces a similar effect to the one that Ozu later achieves in An Autumn Afternoon (1962): the more restricted our visual access to the Hirayamas’ living spaces, the more intimately we feel ourselves to be ‘within’ these spaces we must, as in the theatre, regard from a singular point of perspective that actually keeps us ‘out’ of them.
Thus, in its ‘domesticity’, Rear Window is flâneurial in a distinctly ‘Japanese’ sense I associate with the literature of Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikabu: Jeff, with his retinue of nurses and servants (both man- and maid-), is the Heian lady behind screens.
Something essential to remember while reading The Tale of Genji is that no one in it is ever alone. A lord or lady lived surrounded by a more or less large staff of women and, just outside, men. The notions of solitude and privacy did not exist. …
Still, a lord or lady with no one but attendants or household staff nearby was alone in a way, because in an important sense such people did not count. Relations between people of standing were what mattered, and these were not necessarily conducted face-to-face. Good manners maintained proper distance, which amounted to upholding the accepted social order. … Domestic space, divided by screens, curtains, blinds and so on—objects hardly more substantial than ways of speaking—similarly upheld distance and inviolate dignity.
If the flâneur is inescapably masculine, a rarefication of the hunter under conditions of modernity, the chasseur/chercheur who seeks to ‘collect beauty’, there is a sense in which women too, despite their domestic concealment from the male gaze of the public sphere, have traditionally participated in a circumscribed form of flânerie.
It’s one that we see represented by Sei in The Pillow Book (1002) and by Murasaki in The Tale of Genji (ca. 1010). In the Heian period, a respectable gentlewoman kept herself modestly veiled from the male gaze behind an elaborate array of curtains, veils and screens, and in some very significant sense, as Royall Tyler writes in his introduction to Genji, in the ancient Japanese of Sei’s and Murasaki’s texts, for a woman to have been ‘seen’ by a man meant that she had been ‘known’—in the biblical sense—by him.
Likewise, in the most chilling moment of Rear Window, when Raymond Burr’s Thorwald turns his gaze directly on the camera, what a fuss of modesty Jeff suddenly kicks up: ‘Turn out the light, he’s seen us!’ he cries out in a hoarse whisper to Stella (Thelma Ritter). Suddenly the camera draws back from Stewart’s close-up reaction shot through the rear window of the apartment, and for the first and only time in the picture we see Jeff ‘like a bug under a glass’, from the perspective of one of his neighbours.
Thus, like Sei and the heroines of Murasaki, there is a feminine privilege in Jeff’s seeing while not being seen, in allowing his gaze a flâneurial parcours over the other windows of the courtyard.
And equally, there is something fundamentally ‘compromising’ in the immodesty of ‘being seen’—for that shot reveals Jeff to us in all his moral squalor.
As a feminine form of flânerie, the domestic constraints of the Heian lady’s physical restrictions and limited visual access produces a heightened observational tendency. As Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski observed with respect to Marcel Proust, who led a similarly cloistered, bed-bound life as these ancient ladies, debility and illness encourages certain sensitive souls to compensate by developing their capacities for deep observation.
Instead of seeing what is ‘dramatically different’, Jeff must now develop that inferential regard that ‘reads into’ the flattened, limited spectacle presented to his view—just as we must do with the two-dimensional image presented us in the cinema. It is this type of inferential flâneurial regard that allows Lisa, with her deprecated ‘feminine intuition’, to instantly apprehend that Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy) isn’t into any of her hungry suitors.
‘How can you tell that from here?’ Jeff asks her, craning his neck a little to get a clue as to how she makes that intuitive leap.
‘You said that it resembled my apartment, didn’t you?’ Lisa tartly replies with all the je-ne-sais-quoi Grace Kelly is capable of.
The second major technique of flâneurial cinema in evidence in Rear Window lies in its sound design. We note that Hitchcock directed that the sound should be entirely recorded from the perspective of Jeffries’ apartment. That choice also works to limit the perspective, anchoring sound as well as vision to that of a flâneurial observer.
It’s impossible to overstate the important rôle that sound plays in flâneurial cinema. The musique concrète of Rear Window’s soundscape is its accompaniment—just as it is in Rope, and in The Birds (1963).
The camera’s retreat down the staircase and out into the noise of the street in Frenzy (1972) is also an example of a flâneurial moment privilégié in Hitchcock’s cinema, the musique concrète of the growing ambient street sounds washing, like the accretion of so many sedimentary layers of quotidian banality, over the moment of ‘marvellous wonder’ when the rape and murder of Babs (Anna Massey) will transfigure this unprepossessing coin de la ville into a ‘scène de crime’.
Like water rushing to fill the lowest point, sound rushes in to fill the horror vacui of the empty image as its ‘accomplice’, covering over, ‘hushing up’ the sobs and choking screams we cannot hear.
My point is this: It is really in the world of sound that cinematic image lies in flâneurial cinema. The restricted regard of a personified camera means that the ears become the true scopic senses;—for a deliberately restricted, subjectified regard ‘blinds’ the camera and opens the viewer’s ears to supply the elided parts of the image.
A comparison of Hitchcock’s technique in conveying the horror of Babs’ violation in Frenzy with how he chooses to convey the mysterious fate of Anna Thorwald (Irene Winston) in Rear Window is instructive here: In the later film, the camera literally turns aside from a vision it cannot bear to record and beats a retreat, stopping its ears to Babs’ screams and sobs with the sounds of Covent Garden’s banal commercial spectacle.
Not a lot to reasonably base the supposition of a murder on.
Hitchcock, who was capable of imagining some of the most violent images in cinema, makes the choice to replace what is easily the most spectacularly kinetic image it is possible to film—the destruction of a human being—one which, under the ‘sex and violence’ assumptions of commercial cinema, is easily the most æsthetically pleasing image to mainstream audiences, with sounds that hardly suggest the true horror of a soul violently leaving its body.
The sounds are ambiguous, which, quite apart from being necessary to the film’s narrative conceit, supplying a ‘plausible deniability’ to the images of Thorwald’s banal yet unaccountably puzzling behaviour, puts us in the sensemaking position of being forced to ‘fill in the blanks’ by engaging a cinematic sense other than our eyes—for the camera literally cannot see what happened to Mrs. Thorwald, and there’s no reason to suppose that these two sounds—a woman’s cry, breaking glass—even imply a murder.
We enter, in some sense, a ‘threat posture’ in flâneurial cinema: Given the noirish ambiguity of modernity, it is no longer enough merely to look at the banal spectacle, one must vigilantly listen for clues—audio cues that provide further context which will ‘amplify’ the inferential meaning of what one is seeing in the salience landscape.
In flâneurial cinema, we are seeking to bring the camera tightly to heel, to rein in its affordance to be an ‘objective’, God’s-eye observer—everywhere all at once—and bring its range of vision back within the personal limits of human sight.
The musique concrète of Rear Window supplies a ‘live score’ accompanying its action, the classical ‘movement-images’ which hearken back to Hitchcock’s origins in the silent cinema, and sometimes, as when Thelma Ritter or Grace Kelly mug directly to the camera in its personified rôle as Jeff, the acting in Rear Window is as broad as in a silent melodrama.
Which brings me to the final way in which Rear Window, despite its slick commerciality, may be regarded as an experimental essay in flâneurial cinema.
The conventional reading of Rear Window advanced by critics such as Donald Spoto and Robin Wood is that the spectacle of Jeff’s flâneuristic regard flitting around the courtyard represents an analogical externalization of his internal psychological drama with respect to the prospect of marrying Lisa, with his dilemma being analogically externalized in various scenarios framed in the rear windows of his neighbours.
But in fact, I would argue that the forcibly constrained flânerie around the courtyard undertaken by both his and Lisa’s regards makes them jointly aware of ‘the wonder’ hidden in the banal quotidian in such a way as to revivify their relationship just when it is faltering.
In a sense, the discovery of a hidden mystery, an exotic, outré occurrence couched in the banal vernacular of the visible, ‘marries up’ this couple who are coming apart at the seams.
They become partners in a flâneurial adventure which, in its feminine constraints, its forced sedentariness and immobility, is better suited to Lisa’s pampered, cosmopolitan life than to Jeff’s rugged traipsings around the third world as a photo-journalist. The great mechanized, modern city of New York becomes an amusement park of spectacular wonder they can both enjoy from a tantalizing distance, and Hitchcock doesn’t fail to tell us, with a pointed close-up of Stewart’s admiring face when Kelly rushes back to the apartment to discover Thorwald’s reaction to the cruel ‘prank’ of slipping the note under his door, that Jeffries has discovered an unsuspected vein of pluck in his patrician girlfriend which makes her instantly more ‘wifeable’ to him.
In the urban wonderland of Greenwich Village, in this utterly artificial Luna Park Hitchcock has constructed for these two characters, the mystery of Mrs. Thorwald’s disappearance is a ‘wonderful’—by which I mean, a ‘marvellous’—event: As James Ellroy demonstrates in his appropriation of Walker Percy’s notion of ‘the wonder’ in Clandestine (1982), there is very little to distinguish between those moments of banal beauty in the life of the city which are invisible because they are overlooked and the aberrant criminal events which are hidden from plain view.
When I became more comfortable with solitary patrol, I would ditch out on Norsworthy completely and hit the numbered side streets off Central—tawdry rows of small, white-framed houses, tar-paper shacks, and overcrowded tenement buildings. I bought three pairs of expensive binoculars and secreted them on the rooftops of buildings on my beat. Late at night, I would scan lighted windows with them, looking for crime and wonder. I found it. The whole gamut, from homosexuality—which I didn’t bother with—to wild jazz sessions, to heated lovemaking, to tears. I also found dope addiction—which I did act on, always relaying my information on reefer smoking and worse to the dicks, never trying to grandstand and make the collar myself.
And one can take this further and say that in its aberrant disruption of the orderly running of the ‘machine à vivre’ which is New York City, the revelation of the clandestine crime which provokes ‘wonder’ in the flâneurial observer is on a similar—if not the same—order of spectacular æsthetic pleasure as the ‘marvellous’ poetic events beloved by the surrealists—those violent irruptions of irrational disjuncture.
For both Jeff and Lisa, the flâneurial adventure of inferentially reading into the flat, banal, quotidian spectacle of the courtyard—literally the clandestine ‘backstage’ or ‘behind the scenes’ of urban life—and discovering a ‘marvellous’ truth hidden in the plain view of that unprepossessing actuality, one that miraculously beggars all the probabilizing of Jeffries’ policeman friend Doyle (Wendell Corey), joins this couple more firmly together in dyadic union just when they in danger of coming permanently apart.
When Thorwald eventually enters Jeffries’s apartment, this is the surreal ‘marvellous’ invading the banalité ennuyeuse of Jeff’s existence—his ‘six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment with nothing to do but look out of the window at the neighbours.’
For Hitchcock—particularly in Rear Window—the modern banal is a source of surreal marvel and flâneuristic wonder.
But the shot in Frenzy I alluded to above is another example, a poetic strophe in itself that all but condenses the entire flâneurial message of Rear Window: The further back the personified camera moves from the alienating spectacle, the more the quotidian covers the horrific wonder of murder, and the more difficult it becomes to inferentially read that ‘wonderful’ aberration into the flat – flattening—ultimately flattened image of banal actuality that conceals the miraculously improbable moment when peaceful order is fatally disrupted in the secret life of the City—a ‘marvellous’ moment that is invisible to us for being deliberately overlooked.
‘Is the wealth and status my job provides worth this existential dread?’, Oxford Street, Darlinghurst.
Today on The Melbourne Flâneur I publish my first ‘amplified flânograph’ in quite a while—one of those photographs, taken in the course of mes flâneries, which later inspire something in me—a prose poem, a capsule essay or a ficción—and to which I add the third dimension of an evocative soundscape.
I photographed this signal box one weekday morning in May. I was coming out of the post office at the head of Oxford Street, annual runway for Sydney’s world-famous Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and as I was crossing the street to get to Hyde Park, juggling my shipment of a brand new product—(more on that to come, chers lecteurs)—I was struck by this traffic signal box, one of three, looming towards me from the opposite sidewalk.
Despite having my arms full and nothing but my phone on me, I had to get a shot, sensing, ‘détective des belles choses’ that I am, that there was a clue for me in the message graphed on the side of this signal box.
I was not wrong.
“The Price”, the short story that eventually emerged two months later out of the image above, is an example of one of my literary crime ficciones, what I am calling the ‘nouvelle démeublée noire’—literally, the ‘unfurnished dark short story’.
Basically, the concept of the nouvelle démeublée I’m pioneering is a synthesis of the principles of the French Nouveau Roman (or ‘New Novel’) combined with Willa Cather’s notion of a ‘novel démeublé’ or ‘unfurnished’ novel.
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.
Though I am writing with respect to the French Nouveau Roman, I call these ‘unfurnished’ pieces in which something unsaid is nevertheless felt by the reader as a mood of ambiguity nouvelles démeublées because nouvelles nouvelles (literally, ‘new short stories’) just doesn’t make sense in French.
Last year, French literature celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose violently abstracted and anti-human style I take as my guiding light in the composition of these pieces, while 2023 marks the seventieth anniversary of a landmark event in modern letters: the first publication of a Robbe-Grillet novel, Les Gommes (The Erasers, 1953).
It’s difficult to convey what a scandal Les Gommes represented, first in French literature, then in English, as Robbe-Grillet’s literary influence as the ‘chef d’école’ of the Nouveau Roman was absorbed into Anglophonic culture—particularly in the U.S., where he enjoyed some celebrity as an avant-garde novelist and filmmaker in the sixties.
The apparition of Robbe-Grillet on the literary scene in 1953 represented the emergence of a literary pill that was particularly bitter and difficult to digest even for the most ‘modern’ sensibilities, and the publication of Les Gommes is one of those red-letter moments in twentieth-century history where a writer definitively crosses a boundary of taste that was previously believed to be uncrossable.
While Borges flirts with postmodernism in the thirties and forties, dancing on the threshold of it, it is Robbe-Grillet, in Les Gommes, who boldly and definitively steps through that portal into a vertiginous realm of infinite ambiguity and uncertainty, of radical scepticism and doubt.
Where Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) marks the frontier of modernism, the line in the sand after which nothing can be written that isn’t fundamentally ‘modern’ in its sensibility and style, Les Gommes marks the red line of postmodernism, a definite break with the modern tradition; and after its publication in 1953, we cannot ‘unsee’ the world as Robbe-Grillet shows it to us in that novel—as inhuman as his vision is to many readers, and as much as literature has sought to beat a cowardly retreat from the frontier of the Nouveau Roman he leads us up to.
Les Gommes owes a substantial debt to Ulysses: like Joyce’s novel, it transpires over the course of 24 hours, and like Ulysses, there is an archetypal mythic structure buried in Les Gommes. But where Joyce takes Homer’s Odyssey as the structural basis for Leopold Bloom’s flânerie around Dublin on June 16, 1904, Robbe-Grillet turns instead to Sophocles and the archetypal detective story of Western literature—Œdipus Rex.
For Les Gommes is a kind of ‘existential detective thriller’. Its protagonist is Wallas, a detective (an ‘agent spécial’ as we are continually reminded) assigned to the investigative bureau attached to the Ministry of the Interior—a secret policeman, in other words.
Wallas has been dispatched to an unnamed northern port city to investigate a political assassination, the murder of Daniel Dupont, a professor of economics, by a shadowy anarchist organization which has been waging a campaign of terror: Every night for the past week, at exactly 7:30 p.m., a member of the Deep State cadre to which Dupont belongs has been murdered.
Arriving late at night, just hours after the assassination, Wallas takes a room for the night at the Café des Alliés, a suburban bistro right next door to the victim’s home at the corner of the rue des Arpenteurs and the Boulevard Circulaire which girds the inner city. At the point where Robbe-Grillet takes up the syuzhet, it’s dawn on the morning after the shooting.
Il s’agit d’un événement précis, concret, essentiel : la mort d’un homme. C’est un événement à caractère policier—c’est-à-dire qu’il y a un assassin, un détective, une victime. En un sens, leurs rôles sont même respectés : l’assassin tire sur la victime, le détective résout la question, le victime meurt. Mais les relations qui les lient ne sont pas aussi simples qu’une fois le dernier chapitre terminé. Car le livre est justement le récit des vingt-quatre heures qui s’écoulent entre ce coup de pistolet et cette mort, le temps que la balle a mis pour parcourir trois ou quatre mètres—vingt-quatre heures « en trop ».
The novel is about an event that is precise, concrete, essential: a man’s death. It’s a typical mystery story incident—which is to say that there’s an assassin, a detective, and a victim. In a sense, even their rôles remain the same: the assassin shoots the victim, the detective solves the riddle, and the victim dies. But the relations which unite them are not quite that simple after you’ve read the last chapter. For the book is precisely the tale of 24 hours which pass between the shot being fired and the death, the time it takes for the bullet to travel three or four metres—24 additional hours.
—Alain Robbe-Grillet (my translation)
We know right from the prologue who the shooter is: It’s Garinati, a hired gun who is as incompetent to kill Daniel Dupont as Wallas is to solve Dupont’s murder—although admittedly, in Wallas’s defence, it is rarely the case in a mystery story that a detective is sent to investigate a murder that hasn’t actually happened.
For here too Robbe-Grillet yanks out the mystery, if not the suspense, right at the beginning of the book: Yes, Garinati has snuck into Dupont’s office and shot him, but the wound is only superficial. Despite the papers’ claim that the assassin shot the professor in the chest, Garinati is pretty sure he only got Dupont in the arm. It is Dupont, hiding out in the clinic of Dr. Juard, a shady gynæcologist, who has faked his own death so as to buy 24 hours—the time he needs to sneak back into his villa, grab some important documents, and amscray to the capital.
Thus there is a décalage, a ‘slippage’ in the traditional rôles of these three characters which is equally a lag in time: like Wallas’s stopped watch—stopped, coincidentally, at 7:30 p.m.—Robbe-Grillet has thrust a stick through the spokes of Les Gommes’ cyclical plot, and for 24 hours, the clockwork of the traditional detective story plot labours vainly against that resistance, struggling to advance, until the characters rotate, through a series of interstitial or extra-temporal changes, into their final positions and the generic narrative machinery can start ticking over again.
Robbe-Grillet says that Wallas ‘solves the riddle’, putting particular emphasis on the detective’s traditional rôle, but that’s not really the case. It’s Laurent, the police commissioner out of whose busy hands the case is removed early on, who works out, by a process of logical ratiocination, why the evidence fails to add up.
Rather, in his Œdipal rôle, it is the riddle that solves Wallas—and this is what I mean when I say that Les Gommes is an ‘existential’ detective thriller: our ‘agent spécial’ from the Bureau des Enquêtes is on a mission both epistemological and ontological—a quest in search of himself.
Quête/enquête—quest and investigation: If Wallas fails to solve a mystery twisted enough to riddle a sphinx, it’s because the agent spécial’s rôle in proceedings is purely flâneurial rather than inquisitive.
Right from the third sentence of Chapter 1, in introducing our sleuth, Robbe-Grillet tells us that Wallas has an ‘apparence de flâneur’, that he’s dressed rather nattily for the working-class faubourg of the rue des Arpenteurs, and that he lounges with a certain leisure that makes him a subject of surprise—and even of shock—for the workers making their way to the port.
Thus our ‘agent spécial’, who will spend most of the day exploring the city on foot, going into cafés and automats and ducking into stationer’s shops, is really in town to do something other than collar a killer. He’s an agent of fate.
Œdipus (whose name literally translates as ‘Swollen Foot’) is the first flatfoot, the first gumshoe in Western literature; to him is given the fateful (and fatal) rôle of solving the primal mystery to ‘Know Thyself’.
He’s a tragic detective. Where Joyce chooses another wanderer, Odysseus, ‘the master craftsman of crime’, as his archetype for Mr. Bloom, restoring the classical hero to the humble stature of a man, with Wallas, Robbe-Grillet does not elevate the man to the super-heroic level of the ‘Great Detective’. Wallas, whose ‘pieds sont enflés à force de marcher’ by the dawn of the following day from his traipsings around town, is not a figure who inspires great confidence.
He’s a poor Œdipus, a poor solver of riddles, and as a wanderer through the circular labyrinth of the unfamiliar city, his rôle is purely flâneurial. Rue des Arpenteurs, rue Joseph-Janeck, rue de Brabant, rue de Berlin… this man with swollen feet is condemned to trudge through a salience landscape he increasingly has little heart for, finding himself continually at crossroads with oblique turnings, drawbridges that are raised before him, and on tramways which lead him away from where he actually wants to go.
(It’s no coincidence that the street spoking off the Boulevard Circulaire which leads Wallas to his fate is called the rue des Arpenteurs: arpenter is ‘to pace back and forth’, in the manner of a surveyor, and Wallas spends a great deal of time walking up and down this unprepossessing street, surveying it.)
The pauvre petit bonhomme is such an incompetent detective that he cannot even find his ideal eraser—a quest tangential and incidental to the plot but one which overtakes Wallas’s ostensible mission the more he is diverted and discouraged by his failing to get effectively on the trail of Garinati—who, bizarrely, is trying to catch up with the detective in order to discover if he actually did kill Dupont.
As Alain-Michel Boyer says in his journal article “L’Énigme, l’enquête et la quête du récit: La fiction policière dans Les Gommes et Le Voyeur d’Alain Robbe-Grillet” (1981), right from the beginning, rather than leading his case, Wallas is led by it: he ‘gums up the works’, seeming to gain less impetus as he proceeds, and finds himself continually effaced in his quest to discover who rubbed out Dupont—for, strangely, every piece of evidence, every eye-witness testimony points to a shooter who resembles Wallas himself.
The question quite legitimately arises in the reader’s mind as to why Wallas is actually there since he has so little will for the work, is too self-effacing to question witnesses, treats his urgent mission almost as a pleasure trip, and only really seems motivated to inquire about the eraser he is desperate to buy in every stationer’s shop he comes to.
Much has been made about the significance of the objects accruing in Wallas’ pocket which give Les Gommes its title. An object that is insignificant to the plot becomes the obsessional lapis of all meaning.
Bruce Morrissette, Robbe-Grillet’s evangelist to the Anglophonic world, was the first to suggest that the half-erased brand name printed on the rubber was either Œdipe or Œdipus.
Spoken together, however, the remaining letters D and I sound in French like ‘dé’—the first syllable of the Latin deus. Of course, Œdipus solved a riddle in which the life of man was equated with a day, and our ‘agent spécial’ has been sent to the city to ‘accomplir son œuvre d’inéluctible justice’—something that might be said of an instrument of God on a ‘Day of Judgment’.
But equally, the unusual cubic form of this particular eraser suggests a dé—a die, reminding me of Cæsar’s fateful remark at the Rubicon: ‘The die is cast’ (Alea iacta est).
Though Morrissette is doubtless right, the alternative symbolic interpretations I suggest merely go to prove Robbe-Grillet’s later point that ‘no sooner does one describe an empty corridor than metaphysics comes rushing headlong into it.’
I’m not wedded to either of these interpretations, which disgust me only slightly less than Morrissette’s: any symbolic interpretation of the erasers is ‘on the nose’.
Though it’s probably not the case in this novel so over-determined with occult meaning (that, I think is Les Gommes’ weakness as compared to Robbe-Grillet’s work from La Jalousie [1957] onwards), I would prefer to think, in the spirit of the author’s later work, that there is no significance to the erasers at all—that they are merely there.
We live in an over-determined world where everything may be interpreted indexically as a clue. ‘Le Nouveau Roman, c’est le roman policier pris au sérieux’—‘The New Novel is the crime novel taken seriously,’ Ludovic Janvier stated. This is to say that the Nouveaux Romanciers—particularly Robbe-Grillet—were involved in a sensemaking enterprise.
As Boyer concludes in his 1981 article, paraphrasing Nietzsche, with the Robbe-Grilletian Nouveau Roman, the crime novel fundamentally ‘becomes what it is’—a first-principles, scientific attempt to describe—and thus make some preliminary sense—of a puzzling world from which we have become radically decoupled, and where the report of our own senses must now be taken with scepticism.
… [É]tant donné que le crime est la condition sine qua non du récit de l’enquête, l’enquête est la mise à jour du récit du crime, le récit du récit. … L’enquête, chez Robbe-Grillet, vise en revanche à substituer, au récit d’un crime et d’une enquête sur ce crime, l’histoire même de ce récit. Elle est la quête d’un roman. …
Meurtre ou rapt, la situation initiale de tout roman policier est un manque. Il s’agit donc non seulement de transformer l’énigme en récit, mais de circonscrire ce manque, et de le combler. De sorte que le travail de l’écriture et celui du détective sont une lutte contre le silence des objets et le mensonge ou le mutisme des personnages. L’indicible devient question, puis langage. Qui a tué? ou Pourquoi a-t-on tué? ne sont les interrogations essentielles, mais plutôt: comment peut-on faire de cet événement prétexte—mort d’un homme—un récit? Et la question, comment écrire le crime? s’ouvre alors à une autre question, plus énigmatique encore: comment écrire?
Given that crime is the indispensable condition of the account of the investigation, the investigation is the bringing to light of the account of the crime, the account of the account. … On the other hand, Robbe-Grillet’s literary inquiry aims to substitute, in place of the account of a crime and the investigation into this crime, the very story of this account. It is the ‘quest for a novel’. …
Whether it’s a murder or an abduction, the initial situation of all crime novels is an absence. It is thus a question not only of transforming the enigma into an account, but to circumscribe this absence, and to fill it in, such that the work of writing and that of the detective are a struggle against the silence of objects and the characters’ lies or their refusal to speak. The unsayable becomes a question, hence, language. Who is the killer? or Why have they killed? are not the essential questions, but rather: How does one of make of this pretextual incident—a man’s death—an account? And the question, How to write the crime? then opens itself up to another, more enigmatic query: How to write?
Given an initial void in knowledge, working backwards from that absence, the writer of literary crime fiction, if he is as intellectually honest as Robbe-Grillet, as determined to start from a place of first principles and to eschew the pathetic fallacy of humanistic magical thinking, is eventually led to ask himself: ‘What is it to write?’, or ‘What is writing?’
By playing with the generic elements of para-literature in a postmodern way, Robbe-Grillet constructs a meta-narrative out of the detective genre in Les Gommes, one which contains the generic elements and deals with the essential epistemological question of the form:—‘What is it to know?’
Footsore and weary from his flânerie, at the end of Les Gommes, Wallas comes eventually to know himself in a startling twist of his traditional rôle: Unlike Œdipus, who puts his own eyes out when he discovers who he really is, the murderer of his father and the husband of his mother, Wallas becomes suddenly ‘unblinded’ when he recognizes himself as the man he has been searching fruitlessly for all throughout the day.
Thus Robbe-Grillet shows us that there is a fundamental ontology—a beingness—to the detective’s fundamentally epistemological rôle as a ‘special agent’ in society, as one charged ‘to know’.
And for a dandiacal literary flâneur like myself, the détective des belles choses, the chasseur after beauty who is ever on the hunt for the æsthetic frisson of ‘the marvellous’, the most vivified being lies in knowing, as a city like Sydney, as hellishly labyrinthine as the unnamed harbour city of Les Gommes, gives up clues to the mystery I am writing about in images like those above.
“The Price” is the first audio track I’ve created using assets I’ve recorded myself ‘on location’, recreating Steve’s and Lance’s flânerie down—and across—Oxford Street after midday on a weekday afternoon, like a Method actor getting into the ‘rôles’ of the two characters I’ve created as a writer.
And it’s the first piece I’m officially publishing as a ficción adjacent to the story-world of the literary crime podcast I’ve been plotting since the second Melbourne lockdown, and which is now slowly moving into production—an existential detective thriller which I describe as something like a series such as Mad Men (of which Clive James said that ‘what sounds at first like a quick thriller by Raymond Chandler threatens to turn into a slow novel by Henry James’) meeting a David Lynch movie—I’m thinking of something like Blue Velvet or Mulholland Dr.—with this weird and unholy progeny being set on the streets of Melbourne.
“The Price” will give you some idea of the Jamesian/Robbe-Grilletian literary style I’ve developed for the series over the last three years. If you’re intrigued to hear the podcast, the best way you can support production of the project is to drop $A2 on the audio track below—or click the Share link to re-post it on your social media and help me to build a prospective audience for it.
As I say in the video above, I love St Vincent Gardens because it has a sort of ‘place des Vosges’ feel about it with its rows of Victorian terrace-houses boxing in the leafy square. In a moment of splenetic nostalgie leaning back against les bancs in the park, I can imagine myself back in my beloved Paris in those days of heroic flânerie when the productive indolence of walking and writing was my sole occupation.
It’s therefore the perfect Melburnian setting in which to introduce you in-depth to The Spleen of Melbourne project, which unites the most Parisian city on Australian soil with the first city of flânerie.
One of the key characteristics of my flâneurial literary style as a poet in prose on The Spleen of Melbourne CD is geographical precision: I want the listener to walk alongside me in my flâneries, to see exactly in his or her mind what I have seen with my eyes, to hear what I have heard, to share with me the full sensory experience of a real place in his or her imagination.
But as flânerie is a praxis for inducing in oneself an altered state of consciousness, I also want the reader to equally walk with me through a networked conceptual landscape—almost platonic in its forms—which the built urban environment educes from me.
In other words, I want the reader to also experience the thoughts and feelings I have as I flâne about Melbourne.
This geographic precision about the Melbourne of my prose poems is in distinct contrast to the approach that Charles Baudelaire takes with respect to the Paris of his own collection of prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris (1869). For, curiously, there is a conspicuous lack of geographic specificity in Le Spleen de Paris. No streets are directly referred to—not even the inescapable Seine.
This is a curious oversight since Baudelaire is the premier poet of modernity, the first to trade in the sublimity of Nature for the marvellous spectacle of the modern urban scene. As Carol Clark says in her introduction to the Selected Poems (1996), Baudelaire is the first versifier to introduce the ‘indecorous’, ‘improper’ subject of the modern city into French prosody—and the modern city, of course, is Paris, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’.
Far less than Les Fleurs du mal, the Paris of Le Spleen de Paris, which takes as its ostensible subject this ‘Mecca of Modernity’ whose profane empire of taste has stretched around the globe to intimately influence every city—even far-flung Melbourne—is hardly there as a unifying ambiance, an organizing theme that lends coherence to the collection.
Il est un point par lequel la nouvelle a une supériorité, même sur le poëme. Le rhythme est nécessaire au développement de l’idée de la beauté, qui est le but le plus grand et le plus noble du poëme. Or, les artifices du rhythme sont un obstacle insurmontable à cette développement minutieux de pensées et d’expressions qui a pour objet la vérité.
There is a point through which the short prose account achieves a superiority, even over the poem. Rhythm is necessary to the development of the concept of beauty, which is the greatest and noblest end of the poem. Now, the artifices of rhythm present an insurmountable obstacle to that minute development of thoughts and expressions which has truth for its end.
I don’t entirely agree with this statement, for ‘truth’—the absolute vérité—can only be expressed in its wholeness, and that is the purview of poetry. But one must step a great deal back and see things at a lower level of resolution in order to see them in their totality.
Baudelaire is correct in noticing that prose, uncorseted from the straitjacket of rhythm, has a distinct advantage over poetry in being able to report the superficial detail which makes up that totality at a high level of resolution, but this is not necessarily ‘truth’—only the factitious parts of it seen in close-up.
This is the reef against which the analytic, prosaic sentiment founders. A poet pur-sang like Baudelaire, having a holistic, totalizing vision and world-view, sees the harmonious repetition of a beautiful order—its rhythm—throughout the cosmos.
A natural prosateur like myself, by contrast, sees the discordant disjunctions, juxtapositions, enjambments and adjacencies. The lines of logical thought may ‘flow’, as a set of premises to their conclusion, but not with the harmony of rhythm. Each premise as sentence or paragraph must be ‘developed’, like a musical theme, or a leitmotiv. It must be planed and turned and set into the logical architecture only once the prosateur is certain that it can bear the logical load of the next idea to be set upon it.
Thus the Melbourne of the prose poems on The Spleen of Melbourne CD is a very ‘concrete’ city: that built environment of conceptual forms which are consubstantial with actual things the contemporary flâneur will encounter in Melbourne is explicit.
And on the other hand, the Paris of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris is far less concretely delineated than my Melbourne. It is an implicit city.
Of course, Le Spleen de Paris is a largely ‘posthumous’ work: Published two years after Baudelaire’s death, we know that, at fifty completed pieces, he only achieved half of his projected vision for this collection before the paralyzing stroke which rendered him mute and immobile for the last year of his life.
Having translated about a dozen of the prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris, I’m not sure myself whether many of the pieces in the collection genuinely qualify as being ‘musical without rhythm or rhyme’.
I’m not flattering myself to say that this discordant intellectual ‘music’ is something I regularly achieve in the prose poems which comprise The Spleen of Melbourne project: I’m a prosateur, and I have a more natural sense of the musical possibilities of the sentence—the sound that is linked directly to concrete sense—than Baudelaire, who more naturally inhabits the much stricter form of verse.
Moreover, the three titles that Baudelaire meditated for the collection complicates the issue of his ultimate artistic intent. Though first published—and equally known—under the title of Petits poèmes en prose (“Little Poems in Prose”), at a certain point early in the composition Baudelaire intended to call the collection “Le Rôdeur de Paris” (“The Prowler of Paris”), which sustains the view that the modern city of Paris, as a unifying subject and theme, is central to a global interpretation of the work.
I think we have to conclude, as a working hypothesis, that if as careful and precise a poet as Baudelaire declines to make explicit references to the contemporary urban scene in his prose poems (which comprise a form which lends itself more easily to explicit geographical precision than restrictive rhyming verse), then this is a deliberate æsthetic decision rather than a clumsy oversight on his part.
If, in a poem like “Le Cygne”—perhaps Baudelaire’s single greatest work in verse—as in the “Tableaux parisiens” section of Les Fleurs du mal more generally, he can find a way to make clear and explicit geographic references to the colossally disrupted Paris being pulled down and put up around him by Baron Haussmann within the restrictive straitjacket of the alexandrine, then there is no reason why he could not have taken the same high-resolution approach within the freer form of the prose poem—a form Baudelaire was essentially inventing.
Even if we allow that the corpus of prose poems Baudelaire has ultimately bequeathed to us in Le Spleen de Paris is only half-complete, there are simply too many of the fifty pieces that make some reference, however vague and anecdotal, to contemporary life in Paris under the Second Empire, for us not to provisionally conclude that his vagueness is an æsthetic strategy of some kind, though to what end it seems difficult, in light of the ‘inachevé’ nature of the work, to say.
Thus, while the Paris of Les Fleurs du mal is paradoxically ‘explicit’, clear-eyed, sharply defined, and high-resolution when it would seem that the extreme brevity, condensation and restriction of the verse form would call for a ‘softer’, more global and holistic vision of the modern city, the Paris of Le Spleen de Paris is ‘implicit’: it has this softer, vaguer quality where the freeness of the prosaic form would easily allow for cleaner lines and a sharper delineation of detail—an altogether more remorseless and unsentimental approach.
And without explicit geographic signifiers to orient us in space, Baudelaire’s mid-nineteenth-century Paris might, with a little mutatis mutandis, be any modern city anywhere.
Which leads me to propose, as I do in the sleeve booklet accompanying The Spleen of Melbourne CD, that Baudelairean Spleen, that ‘bilious melancholy’ and ‘choleric sorrow’ which Baudelaire perceived as a specific quality of modern Paris, is a mood of ‘sinister tristesse’ that attends every modern city everywhere that has been touched by the corrupting tentacle of that ‘empire of taste’ which had its Holy See aux Tuileries—including Marvellous Melbourne.
In reading Baudelaire’s tableaux parisiens redux in Le Spleen de Paris, with their hermetic discontinuity from each other, I am often reminded of those beautiful Japanese screens depicting scenes from The Tale of Genji, the salient ‘images’ of Lady Murasaki’s great novel, the high points of emotion in her long, story-like chapters being separated from each other by labyrinthine clouds of gold ground.
As I have written in one of the novelistic chapters of my Orpheid, my experience of Paris (particularly Montmartre) would be something like living in a Japanese screen where the discreet scenes of one’s existence, the high prosaic moments of flâneuristic exploit and artistic heroism dans le quotidien, were separated from one another by dense, serried hedges of cloud, as though one were wandering through a labyrinth that took in tout Paris.
One descended into the misty maze of the Métro at Lamarck-Caulaincourt and popped up again, by mysterious shifts onto other lines and arrow-led leggings through white-tiled corridors communicating between them, at some other point which had no visual continuity with it, prowled around in that milieu, learning its secret byways, how blocks, streets, whole neighbourhoods connected up with one another, and then re-descended to some other part to do the same again.
And yet somehow, a holistic sense of Paris, of the totality of its detailed organization, emerged by this flâneuristic means of random randonnée just as, in the letter to Arsène Houssaye which prefaces Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire proposes the ‘vertebral’ discontinuity of his work as its chief and unique virtue:
Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu’il n’a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement. Considérez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodités cette combinaison nous offre à tous, à vous, à moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper où nous voulons, moi ma rêverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture ; car je ne suspends pas la volonté rétive de celui-ci au fil interminable d’une intrigue superfine. Enlevez une vertèbre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister à part. Dans l’espérance que quelques-uns de ces tronçons seront assez vivants pour vous plaire et vous amuser, j’ose vous dédier le serpent tout entier.
My dear friend, I send you a little work of which one is not able to say, without being unjust, that it has neither top nor tail since everything in it is, on the contrary, top and tail simultaneously, alternatively, and reciprocally. Consider, if you please, what admirable convenience such a combination offers to all of us—to you, me, the reader. We can slice it and dice it as we please—me, my reverie, you, the manuscript, the reader, his reading; for I do not keep the restive attention of this latter hanging from the interminable thread of some super-fine plot. Take away a vertebra and the two pieces of this tortuous phantasy will merge together again effortlessly. Chop it up into numerous fragments and you will see that each of them can live on its own. In the hope that some of these sections are lively enough to please and amuse you, I take the liberty of dedicating the entire serpent to you.
—Charles Baudelaire, “À Arsène Houssaye”, Le Spleen de Paris (2000, p. 5 [my tranlsation])
Of course, there was no Métro in Baudelaire’s day, so he is proposing in his work, by a prophetic fantasy, the Ouroboran organization of the modern city Paris will become as a circular snake. Somehow the linear network of discreet vectors which compose the modern city of Paris as designed by Baron Haussmann form a recursive maze which feeds endlessly upon itself.
Thus, in place of geographic specificity in Le Spleen de Paris, we get a proto-Benjaminian catalogue of prototypical things commonly encountered in the implicit city—Paris in this instance, but it could be any modern city touched by Paris’s influence—repeated from prose poem to prose poem.
There is the theme of ‘the streets’ which crops up again and again as the principal linking vector. We are led from the streets back into ‘the room’ in prose poems like “La Chambre double” and “À une heure de matin”. Equally, there is the recurrent theme of ‘the park’ in “Le Fou et la Vénus” and “Les Veuves”, common ground for mutual civic enjoyment of the urban spectacle. And this theme segues into communal fêtes of marvellous spectacle, as in “Le Vieux Saltimbanque”.
A thematic organization of Le Spleen de Paris has not, as far as I know, been attempted along the Benjaminian lines of The Arcades Project (1927-40), but I’ve detected at least a dozen discreet urban themes into which the prose poems can be classified and re-classified.
And as per Baudelaire’s boast to Houssaye, if a thematic parcours of Le Spleen de Paris were attempted, one could create a conceptual city—perhaps an almost infinite number of conceptual cities—based upon the combinatorial and permutational arrangement and re-arrangement of the prose poems.
‘Commerce and fashion’, ‘urban types’, ‘the revolutionary spirit’, ‘sounds’, ‘food’, ‘animals’, ‘crowds’, ‘women’, ‘cafés, libraries, shops’:—In these content niches, into which the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris can be endlessly categorized and re-categorized, Baudelaire prototypes an implicit modern city from the specific parts of his experience of Paris in the middle years of the nineteenth century.
The implicit Paris of the prose poems is one which we can still recognize today, wherever in the world we are. It is perhaps no coincidence that in the last line of the last prose poem on The Spleen of Melbourne CD, “Milton, when a youth”, I invoke ‘the labyrinthine banality of my habitual solitude as a flâneur in the grand green maze of a great city in the late afternoon.’
Melbourne is not invoked specifically in that line, and indeed, in the prose poem, set in the Carlton Gardens, I disturb my female companion by volubly evoking passionate memories of afternoons passed idly in Paris’s Tuileries Gardens: The two places and times merge momentarily for me, and in ‘the grand green maze’ of time and space linking the suburbs of my life across a universal city in two hemispheres, the city of Paris is implicit in the explicit city of Melbourne.
Paris, as Hemingway said, is ‘a moveable feast’: if you’ve had the good fortune to live there as a young man, you carry it with you wherever you go for the rest of your life.
And thus, Baudelairean Spleen—le spleen de Paris—that ‘bilious melancholy and choleric sorrow’ that modern urban life engenders in us, is equally, for the Parisian flâneur displaced to antipodean climes and damned to walk, as a refugee, down-under in search of his heart’s home, ‘the spleen of Melbourne’, the most Parisian city on Australian soil.
It is urban spleen tout court.
You can purchase your own copy of The Spleen of Melbourne audiobook below. As I say in the video, every copy of the physical CD comes personally signed, wax-sealed as a guarantee of artistic authenticity, and gift-wrapped by yours truly. If you choose to purchase the digital album, you’ll also get a bonus track not on the physical CD itself.
“The Spleen of Melbourne” [CD audiobook]
Personally signed, sealed and gift-wrapped by the author. Price includes worldwide postage. Purchase the physical CD and get bonus MP3 versions of all the tracks absolutely free!
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“The Spleen of Melbourne” [MP3 audiobook]
12 MP3 tracks downloadable onto any device plus bonus trailer. 24-page PDF booklet featuring Dean Kyte’s evocative street photography of Melbourne. Worldwide delivery with 24 hours.
824-8 Lygon Street, Carlton North, a typical example of nineteenth-century Melburnian row architecture. Beyond it, to the left, is the hall of the Società Isole Eolie Melbourne, an art déco gem dating from the period when Carlton was the Jewish, rather than Italian, quarter of Melbourne.
When Alizée turned north into Lygon Street out of Fenwick, she saw him wandering slowly in the opposite direction past the Eolian Hall. His head was turned towards the creamy déco pile, evocative, in its Mediterranean blancheur, of her homeland as it shimmered faintly in the midday heat. The bottlegreen brim of his Fedora described a gloomy arc of shadow which just veiled his eyes, further occluded by the bluish haze of smoke from his Candela, as he tacked past the hall in a not altogether steady drift, whether dreamily attracted by its magnetism, or faintly oppressed by the rising heat, it was difficult to say at that distance.
He had adjusted his wardrobe to the weather and was wearing the limegreen dress shirt, its French cuffs folded back and cinched together by gold links which matched the garters hitching up his sleeves. The skyblue waistcoat hung open, exposing a suggestion of suspender where the book, hugged loosely to his breast, pushed back the edge of his vest. The dark green patterned bowtie was a little askew, its jaunty angle mimicking the rakish slant of the Fedora’s brim. He wore the checked, mustardcoloured slacks, the breaks of which bounced gracefully over the tan, brogued wingtips of the derby boots along with his slow, loping gait as he sauntered past the hall, regarding it abstractedly and yet with a set to his mouth, around the butt of the green cigar, which implied contentment with life.
Alizée quickened her pace until just before he passed the Eolian Hall completely and turned his head back to twelve o’clock. When he seemed on the verge of noticing her, she slowed up abruptly to match his casual saunter, raising her right hand, encumbered, as always, with the iPhone, and waved it at him.
—Buongiorno! she greeted him enthusiastically as they closed the distance.
He took the Candela out of his mouth and saluted her with it as he approached.
She came on with her habitual onslaught of high energy, running into him just before the triple row of terraces under the creamy, partly mutilated cornice which dominated this block of Lygon Street, its mascarons, jutting from corbels, projecting from ends of plaster, gazing fixedly into the green wastes of the General Cemetery across the street, stoically ignorant of the exuberant display of affection to their collective left. For Alizée did not hesitate to kiss him fully on the lips as she flung her arms around his neck, rocking him back a little in his centre of gravity with the collision of her lips as he returned the embrace more equivocally, resting the free fingers of his right hand lightly, briefly on her flank.
—Una bella giornata, vero? she enthused. Che sole! che cielo! For once, Melbourne seems like home—though not, I should say, a Natale!
—Sì. I think we’re past winter now, he admitted coolly as he stepped back from her embrace, returning the green cigar to the corner of his mouth for a quick drag.
He turned his head a little to the right, blew a plume of smoke politely to one side of her, but his hard grey eyes remained firmly fixed ahead, on Alizée, as they took the measure of her very quickly through the veil of smoke. In an instant, his cool manner had softened a little. Though the eyes lost none of their probing, assessing quality, they seemed to smile at her.
—You’re not in your shop today. What are you up to? he asked with amiable brutality.
—Faccio del shopping, she said, holding up the green Woolies bag depending from her left hand. The bag was very light—empty even. E tu? What are you reading?
Without waiting for a reply, she grasped the book, a slim paperback, not rudely, but with a certain proprietorial familiarity, the fingers of her left hand curling around the pages until they were against his shirtfront. His face wore a faint, wry expression which might have signified amusement or annoyance as he let her take it away from him.
She flipped her wrist back to reveal the front cover. It was a French giallo. The cover showed a young brunette, slim with attractive, pointed features—not entirely dissimilar to Alizée herself—in a silk slip with spaghetti straps—rather like the green cotton playsuit she was wearing—squeezing her small tette together and regarding the graceful shadow between them with the proud absorption of feminine possession. The photograph had been solarized so that the lowlights of the brunette’s skin were weirdly purple and the bronzy slip had been rendered garish and fauvistic. The title was Le facteur fatal, by an author—a Belgian perhaps—calling himself Didier Daeninckx.
The left corner of Alizée’s mouth made a small reflexive moue.
—Tu lis d’trucs comme ça?
He shrugged Gallically, the end of the Candela sketching a volute of smoke—like a question mark—with the sprezzatura of the gesture. He gave an impression of being bored by the conversation.
—I just found it in an opshop in Brunswick Road, he said, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder, indicating the direction he had come. With the vertical movement of the cigar, the question mark crossed itself out.
—Je l’ai acheté pour lire du français.
With a slight inclination of his head,—like a very reduced bow,—he proffered his left hand, palm upward, to her, his eyes, fixed on hers with a polite insistence which seemed, simultaneously, to mock the courtliness of the silent request for repatriation.
Alizée returned Le facteur fatal to him.
There was a brief vacuum in the conversation filled only by the circulation beside them as they regarded each other for a moment of doubtful comfortability, their eyes palpating faces that were still inscrutable to each other even after six weeks. Alizée broke the pause cautiously.
—I haven’t seen you around for a couple of weeks, she essayed hesitantly;—not since the day we went to Williamstown together. I thought you must have gone somewhere to see your family—per Natale, perhaps?
His face lost none of its pleasant inscrutability, his eyes seeming to glitter as they squinted through the last puff of smoke he took from the Candela. He took his time dropping the fuming butt to the asphalt and heeling it out with his derby. He toed the flattened cylinder towards the bluestone gutter with what seemed a thoughtful bunt of his boot.
—I had to go to… Sydney per una settimana – o giù di lì.
—Ancora una volta? You were in Sydney last month as well.
Alizée’s eyes acquired a cautiously roguish twinkle.
—Ton métier de flâneur te porte loin.
His eyes searched her face for a halfbeat, and then:
—We never sleep.
Their eyes smiled at each other and her face flushed attractively beneath the Mediterranean tan, although the smile, on his side, did not quite reach his lips.
He broke eye contact with her after a circumspect interval. A southbound Route 1 tram was passing them, slowing with a screel of its wheels. It braked in the long perspective of Lygon Street under the petrified falaises of the City skyline erupting through the green amoncellement of trees that stood sentry along the fenceline of the General Cemetery. He watched as it drew to a stop at the corner of Fenwick Street, the train of southbound traffic pausing deferentially in its wake, and three passengers alighted from the B-class, going their several ways with caution.
One of the typical denizens of Yarra, this one an arts student who fancied herself a feminine John Lennon, with dark, round, silverrimmed sunglasses, a loud, mannish shirt and thin black jeans, the hems of which were rolled up to reveal her Doc Martens, passed them bearing a canvas tote over her shoulder, an obnoxious slogan against the government stencilled on the side of it. He looked down at his brogues and let the girl pass before speaking. When he did so, it was with an experimental essay at confidence that seemed scrupulously mindful of not appearing too forceful in pressing its suit, too inconsiderate of the manifold reasons Alizée might have for rejecting the proposition.
—Look, he said, I know you have no family in this country, but I understand that you might have other… engagements on Monday.
He paused momentarily. Alizée declined to take advantage of this fenestration in his speech as an opportunity to rise to the bait it implied.
He went on a deal more softly, and his eyes, though still sharp, still probing, still assessing her visage minutely as he spoke, almost gave an impression, as they narrowed slightly, of having hit upon a happy inspiration couched in the proposition his voice was rehearsing, one he himself had not previously divined.
—Would you perhaps like to take a cheeky avventura with me on Christmas Day? un picnic, perhaps? to an undisclosed location to be advised when your eyes are looking at it?
At the word ‘avventura’, the blue jets in Alizée’s silver eyes flared up appreciably.
—I don’t think it’s going to be as hot as this on Monday, he added as an afterthought, an additional justification to the good; an exculpation of Melbourne’s unbankable weather, of the debatable antipodean pleasure of passing a blazingly hot Christmas Day outdoors more generally—if she needed it.
Alizée did not. Her face broke into broad enthusiasm at the idea.
—O, un’avventura sounds brilliant! And if the weather isn’t fine, we will adventure anyway!
A soupçcon of roguish sidelight entered her eye briefly once again as her bangs shook with the enthusiastic upward movement of her head in a jerkish nod—or perhaps it was the sun alighting on her forehead as those parenthetical twin curtains moved briefly aside from their usual halfdrawn position occluding her features.
He seemed a little taken aback by how well this proposta had been received and watched her access of enthusiasm from those removes, the cool depths of assessment, with the wry indulgence of a parent giving a delightful child its head.
—Buono, he said in the next second, when she had settled down. Then I will make i preparativi. I’ll go to Rathdowne Street now and pick up a few things.
—Hai bisogno che porto qualcosa?
—Del vino, perhaps. I’ll leave it to you. Whatever you like.
—Allora…
—Allora.
His voice had acquired a seductive firmness and his mouth now joined his eyes, as they held hers gently in parting, in a very definite smile.
—A lunedì, he said softly.
—A lunedì—Ciao, caro!
She launched her lips at him again and he took the collision more gracefully this time, though he still demurred to linger long in her embrace.
—Ciao, he said, giving her one gentle pat on the derrière en passant and slipping smoothly past her to continue his southward flânerie, with more purpose in his stride this time.
He made the corner quickly, and when he had rounded it into Fenwick Street, he stopped abruptly just inside. His eyes were turned down to the pavement and, with the gravity of his reflections, his face slowly resumed its habitual cast of dour pensiveness as his eyes scanned the asphalt for something that was within himself. His posture seemed to relax of its own accord and he leant his shoulder to the white plaster wall of the house on the corner as he thought.
The persistent passage of traffic and trams behind him did not seem to reach him.
Then, rolling suddenly around, he turned, voltafaccia, towards Lygon Street and the grille of the General Cemetery. He moved stealthily forward two steps until he presented the narrowest possible profile to the street and, transferring the book to his other hand, reached into the left pocket of his waistcoat. He produced the small rectangular hand mirror and, holding it down at his hip, angled it back up Lygon Street until, in its arc, it caught the profile of the Maltese ragazza in the olive playsuit with the embroidered bodice.
Alizée had not advanced very far from where he had left her. She was standing in front of the Eolian Hall and was studying it intently. Her head turned from left to right, not in the big movements she had used with him, but in small ones, as if she were looking for something—a clue, perhaps, or something she had lost.
Then, as he watched her in the angle of the mirror, his face devoid of expression, she raised the iPhone and took a photo of the pile.
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