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.
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
