Robbe-Grillet was a leading light in the Nouveau Roman ( 'new novel') movement which emerged in France in the 1950s. Whether this can be considered a modernist or a postmodernist movement depends on how you define postmodernism, and nobody has ever been able to define postmodernism satisfactorily.
The Nouveau Roman writers were uninterested in conventional narratives. The Voyeur has a narrative, but it’s almost accidental. It’s as if the protagonist, Matthias, collects bits and pieces of evidence drawn from his observations and memories and it is possible from these elements to construct a narrative but there is no way to be sure that is is the correct one. In fact there is no way to be sure that there is any story at all. The story told by these items of evidence might be illusory, merely a result of the innate human desire to see events as forming patterns. Sometimes the patterns are real. Sometimes they’re just random observations.
Matthias is a watch salesman. He arrives on a small island, hoping for a successful sales trip. He was born on this island and has various memories connected with it, although we have to consider the possibility that he has never been there before.
Memories are triggered but Matthias knows that memories can be misleading or false. He meets an old school friend but he has no actual recollection of having ever set eyes on this fellow before.
While Matthias is on the island a terrible event occurs. It may be a shocking crime. A young girl is found dead. It may have been murder but for various reasons the evidence pointing to murder has to be regarded by the reader as very ambiguous. It is entirely possible that the girl fell from the cliff accidentally.
Matthias tries to reconstruct the events, and his own actions, from his memories of that fateful day. These memories may be mixed up with memories from his past, of things that may have happened to him years earlier. It is possible that those things really happened to him, but it is also possible that they never happened. Some of his memories seem to be constructed from stories he has heard about other people. Matthias seems to have difficulty separating other people’s experiences from his own. We might well suspect that Matthias is the sort of guy who reads detective stories and true crime stories. The newspaper cutting he carries around with him might be about a crime he committed, or it might simply be a story of a crime committed by someone else.
Matthias’s memories are disturbing but at the same time he regards them with detachment. There are perhaps some existentialist elements to this novel. Matthias is an observer (hence the title). Is he a participant as well, or just an observer?
Matthias obsesses about time (it’s probably no coincidence that he makes his living selling wristwatches). Everything he does have to fit a timetable. He has only six hours on the island before he has to catch the steamer back to the mainland. He has to sell 89 wristwatches in that time. He needs to know how long each sale will take. If sales are slow early on he has to recalculate his timetable.
He has to know exactly how long it will take him to get back to the pier. That timetable has to be constantly revised as well.
Matthias is obsessed by numbers. He needs to know exactly how many wristwatches he needs to sell, and the wristwatches come in different styles with different prices. He does the calculations in his head again and again.
Matthias is constantly trying to piece together the story of his day on the island. Possibly not the story, but a story. A narrative. Memories and observations can be pieced together in different ways to make stories that are not necessarily the same story or the real story. He is doing what a novelist does - piecing together various plot elements in order to construct a narrative but the plot elements do not necessarily have to be put together in just one way. They can make different narratives. A novelist’s narrative does not have to be true. A novelist deals with stories but perhaps not with truth or reality. Perhaps there is no true narrative. A novelist’s narrative does however have to make sense on its own terms and it has to suit the novelist’s purpose.
Matthias is trying to construct a narrative that will suit his purpose. He is having a lot of difficulty doing this. He has to make a lot of revisions. A lot of recalculations.
It all sounds very dry and intellectual and very arty but in fact it’s very entertaining. There was always a playfulness about Robbe-Grillet’s work. And he hoped the reader (or the viewer in the case of his film) would enjoy the games as well. The Voyeur is highly recommended.
I’ve also reviewed Robbe-Grillet’s delightfully playful 1965 novel La Maison de rendez-vous. He was also a brilliant film director. I’ve reviewed many of his movies - the hypnotic L’immortelle (1963), his superb exercise in surrealism La Belle Captive (1983), the wildly strange and erotic Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) and the enticingly puzzling Playing with Fire (1975).
Happily the English translation of The Voyeur is easy to find.
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