Alain Robbbe-Grillet | The Voyeur / 1958

murderer in the mind

 

Alain Robbe-Grillet Le Voyeur, translated from the French by Richard Howard as The Voyeur (New York: Grove Press, 1958)

 

The reader of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s second fiction, The Voyeur (1955), is ultimately confused concerning the actions and motivations of the central character, in part because of the author’s intense description of landscape and actions—which the author has described in his critical writing as an attempt to establish “the presence” of objects and gestures—as opposed to and set against the few internal perceptions allowed the character. In the case of the central figure—one might say, the only significant character, of this work—Mathias, we learn quite early that he is an obsessive being, whose focus on what he witnesses and his daily plans of action parallel his profession: as a salesman of inexpensive watches, Mathias is entirely a man caught within the moment, a being trapped in present time. But it is a cut-rate time, a time that is never in sync with his experiences.

     Even as he is about the embark upon the island where he has grown up, we see him literally attempting to mark his world, to fathom its meaning by relating whatever catches his attention to everything else around it. Such an intense focus often makes him lose sight of what he is trying to perceive:

 

             Mathias decided on a mark shaped like a figure eight, cut clearly enough in

             the steep, recessed embankment to make a good point of reference. The mark

             was exactly opposite him, that is, ten or fifteen feet to the left of the point

             where the landing slip emerged from the pier. When, after forcing himself to

             keep his eyes in the same place for several seconds, he saw it again, he was not

             quite sure he was looking at the same mark—other irregularities in the stone

             looked just as much like—or unlike—the two little coupled circles whose

             shape he still remembered.

 

Although he has, similarly, carefully planned out his day on the island, calculating time and time again the number of watches he must sell and the ground he is determined to cover, his journey through space is constantly going awry as he lingers too long in conversation with customers, miscalculates the amount of time he must spend with other individuals such as the man from whom he rents a bicycle, and loses track of his intentions. An attempt to sell a watch to the local bartender’s wife, for example, leads him to an upstairs bedroom which suddenly triggers vaguely sensual urges within him, and he leaves without even encountering the woman. A visit to the home of the only people he actually knows on the island, leaves him literally standing within a daze of confusion when he finds they are not at home. 

      It is this constant friction between the essence of things and actions and the inner and often unknowable emotions and desires of Robbe-Grillet’s character that creates a tension in The Voyeur that transforms it from a seemingly realist presentation of reality to a metaphysical mystery. Despite the detail of what we, through Mathias, observe and the evident simplicity of his travels, the reader is suddenly jolted into a sense of confusion and displacement. When a young shepherd girl goes missing, later to be found drowned and possibly sexually assaulted, the natives seem to suspect the salesman, who despite his birth into this world, is now a stranger. Sensing their accusations, Mathias internally recounts his actions, attempting to explain how certain of his movements—movements which we presumed we had shared with the character himself—cannot be accounted for. And soon, in his internal visions of the young girl and other sexually related objects (Mathias appears to be carrying with him a newspaper article about just such an attack), he seems to implicate himself in a murder of which we—if we are to believe the narrative voice we have willingly followed throughout—know him to be innocent.

     The fact that, despite his precise organization of his day, he misses the boat which is to return him home, further complicates the issue, as Mathias suddenly seems to grow disinterested in time, spending several nights, coincidentally, in a room of the very house in which he grew up, wandering the island on foot as he searches for clues of his own involvement.

     Robbe-Grillet further heightens our growing sense of the unreliability of our reading experience by presenting cinematic-like flashes of Mathias’ deviant behavior. For an instant, we suddenly witness, through the wanderings of his own mind, his struggle with the girl on the cliff and her drop into the sea. The young son of his island friend seems equally convinced of Mathias’ guilt, and it appears that we have no choice but to question the “reality” we have previously seemed to witness. Mathias appears to be resigned to his arrestment.

    Late in the work, however, after refusing an offer to take a trawler back to land a day early, Mathias sits in he bar where he suddenly seems to recall violent acts he has committed against the barmaid:

 

                 After a final, roundabout inspection of the table service, she stretches

                 out her arm as if to move something—the coffeepot, for instance—but

                 everything is in order. Her hand is small, the wrist almost too delicate. The

                 cord had cut into both wrists, making deep red lines. Yet she was not bound

                 too tightly. The cord must have sunk into the flesh because of her futile

                 efforts to get free. He had been forced to tie her ankles too—not together,

                 which would have been easy—but separately, each one attached to the

                 ground about a yard apart.

 

We have seen Mathias throughout the work with ropes and cords (which even as a child he had collected), and suddenly we perceive that he is, in effect, guilty, that he is a perverted criminal—but in mind only. A voyeur, he can only imagine himself being involved in life, and in his anger for the permanent distance from all that he so carefully observes, he can only represent that involvement through sadomasochistic acts. The boat leaves, on time for once, with Mathias on it, returning him to the regular and regulated pattern of his meaningless life. 

 

Los Angeles, April 5, 2008