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Kentucky Romance Quarterly

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Spatial Perception and the

Mimetic Mode in the Novels of
Balzac and Robbe-Grillet
John A. Fleming

University of Toronto
Published online: 09 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: John A. Fleming (1977) Spatial Perception and the Mimetic
Mode in the Novels of Balzac and Robbe-Grillet, Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 24:2,
209-219, DOI: 10.1080/03648664.1977.9928141
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03648664.1977.9928141

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SPATIAL PERCEPTION AND THE MIMETIC MODE

IN THE NOVELS OF BALZAC AND ROBBE-GRILLET

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John A. Fleming

One of the difficulties for many readers of Balzac or Robbe-Grillet lies in the
detailed and frequent description of the physical world to be found in the novels
of both. Readers of Balzac have often skipped or skimmed these lengthy
descriptions of setting while potential readers of Robbe-Grillet have sometimes
rejected his novels altogether as unreadable. Such reactions suggest a
misunderstanding of the nature and function of their respective uses of setting
and call for some attempt at explanation. At the same time a broader question
also arises because most readers see that these two superficially similar uses of
setting are in fact profoundly different although they have no very clear understanding of this difference.
It is my contention that a fundamentally opposite way of viewing the external
world is at work in the novels of Balzac and Robbe-Grillet and that their individual differences may be tied to certain generalized psychic conditions
related to differing perceptions of space. If we as readers fail to respond to
Balzacs descriptions of the physical world it is in part because his settings no
longer correspond to the realities of contemporary perceptual experience,
although paradoxically they may continue to satisfy our literary expectations.
On the other hand if we find Robbe-Grillet unreadable it is because the physical
universe as he describes it represents a radical new ordering of perceptual experience which we have not as yet accepted, in the contemporary novel at
least, conditioned as we are by the literary traditions of what may be called the
mimetic and representational forms of the nineteenth century.
Although Balzac and Robbe-Grillet both use the physical universe extensively in their creation of. a particularized fictional world their conception of the
physical setting and its relationship to man is entirely different. The declared attitudes of both toward the physical world are too well known to require treatment here, but we should perhaps recall their basic positions before attempting
any comparative study of what the texts themselves express.
For Balzac the environment is an influence upon and a reflection of
character. Toute sa personne explique la pension comme la pension implique
sa personne he says of Mme Vauquer. Environment in a biological sense
forms and motivates character; setting in a fictional sense explains to the reader
what Grandet is and how he lives.

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Robbe-Grillet on the other hand feels that the physical world simply is. It has
no significance in itself, although it is subject to that which man chooses to project upon it falsely: Or le monde nest ni signifiant. ni absurde. II est tout
simplement. . . .auteur de nous. defiant la meute de nos adjectifs animistes ou
menagers, les choses sont 16. Leur surface est nette et lisse, intacte, sans eclat
louche ni transparence.2 As a result the landscapes of Robbe-Gritlet present a
neutral face to the reader. They neither explain character nor motivate action in
the usual sense.
These differing concepts of the physical world have important aesthetic consequences for the presentation and perception of the physical setting in the
novels of Balzac and Robbe-Grillet. Since both rely heavily upon objective
descriptive passages of great length and abundance a certain similiarity would
seem to exist at first glance. Le Pdre Goriot begins in somewhat the same way
as La Jalousie with the detailed description of a house. Yet our reactions to
these two dwellings are immediately distinct. Before making any comparison
however it would be useful to look more closely at two of Balzacs most famous
houses, the Maison Vauquer and the Maison Grandet.
In both cases we have an elaborate and detailed description spread over
many pages and interspersed with other material. We see each house in
characteristic detail, its position in the town, the quarter, the street. There is
only one Maison Vauquer, one Maison Grandet, and the reader is constantly
given the specifics of form and position necessary to establish this fact. The
authenticity of both is guaranteed for u s by their precise location in geographic
space and a catalogue of observable features. Balzac takes his distance upon
raw experience in mimetic terms:
La rnaison OG sexploite la pension bourgeoise appartient i Mrne Vauquer. Elle est
situee dans le bas d e la rue Neuve-Saint-GeneviPve, i Iendroit od le terrain
sabaisse vers la rue de IArbalhte par une pente si brusque et si rude que les
chevaux la rnontent ou la descendent rarernent. . . .Nu1 quartier de Paris nest
plus horrible, ni. disons-le, plus inconnu. La rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevihve surtout
est cornrne u n cadre d e bronze, le seul qui convienne 2 ce r6cit. auquel on ne
saurait trop preparer Iintelligence par des couleurs brunes. par des idees
.
graves
La facade d e la pension donne sur un jardinet. en sorte que la rnaison tornbe i
angle droit sur la rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevisve. oii vous la voyez coup6e dans sa
profondeur. Le long de cette facade. entre la rnaison et le jardinet. rBgne un
cailloutis en cuvette. large dune toise devant lequel est une allee sabke. bordee d e
geraniums. de lauriers-roses et de grenadiers plantes dans de grands vases en
faience bleue et blanche.3
,

Balzac is out to convince us of the actual existence in the real world of the
Maison Vauquer and to make us feel through his description something of its
inhabitants and their way of life. The same is true of Grandets dwelling. There
is an appeal to both sense and sentiment:

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II se trouve dans certaines villes de province des maisons dont la vue inspire une
melancolie 6gale 2 celle que provoque les cloitres les plus sombres. les landes les
plus temes ou les ruines les plus tristes. Peut-&re y-a-t-il 2 la fois dans ces rnaisons
et le silence du cloitre. et Iaridite des landes. et les ossements des ruines. . . .
Ces principes de melancolie existent dans la physionomie dun logis sit& 2
Saumur. , .

Eighteen pages later we have the faCade of the Maison Grandet described in
detail as Grandet himself has been presented in the intervening space:
Les trous in6gaux et nombreux que les intemgries du c h a t y avaient bizanernent
pratiques donnaient au cintre et aux jambages de la baie Iapparence des pierres
vermiculOes d e Iarchitecture franqaise et quelque ressemblance avec le porche
d u n e geBle. Au-dessus du cintre r6gnait un long bas-relief d e pierre dure sculptee.
representant les quatre Saisons. figures deji rongees et toutes noires. Ce bas-relief
etait surmont6 dune plinthe saillante. sur laquelle selevaient plusieurs d e ces
v6gktations dues au hasard, des pari6taires jaunes, des liserons, des convolvulus.
du plantain, et un petit cerisier assez haut dej2.
The Maison Vauquer and the Maison Grandet as well as their environs are seen
not as simple visual forms but as qualified materially and sentimentally. Both
are reflections not only of real places and presumably real structures, but of
their owners as well. The melancholy and decay of the Maison Grandet find
their cause in the nature of Grandet as Mme Vauquers boarding-house mirrors
the coquetry and cheap display of the widow herself.
At the same time these environments act upon the readers emotions to
create a more general atmosphere coincident with the action of the two novels.
They explain to the reader what is to follow, and prepare him psychologically
and emotionally for the unfolding of a drama. Their function is to give perspective internally, by situating the various elements of the narration within the
frame of the novel, and externally, by the situation in historical time and space
of verifiable points of reference. The reader finds himself ensconced at a certain
angle and distance from what is to be told. However as details accumulate the
natural model is rendered not necessarily in its reality but in its appearance, in
other words, impressionistically. What we see is not as important as what we
are meant to feel, hence the disorder of many of Balzacs descriptions: La rue
Neuve-Sainte-Genevikve surtout est comme un cadre d e bronze, le seul qui
convienne 2 ce rQcit, auquel on ne saurait trop prQparer Iintelligence par des
couleurs brunes, par des idQesgraves. . . .
Several techniques contribute to these impressionistic effects: the use of
affective vocabulary (horrible, graves, mQlancolie. sombre, ternes,
tristes, froid) ; figurative language and the anthropomorphization of objects
(comme un cadre d e bronze. les ruines les plus tristes, les ossements des
ruines, la physionomie dun logis); and finally visual color, red. rose, purple,
green, blue, and white in the first instance, yellow, green, white and perhaps

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red in the second. Here sense perception carries with it an implicit value and
emotion.
Although the banana plantation in La Jalousie is also seen, the house
described tells us little of its inhabitants. Nor does it have any typical significance
as bourgeois boarding house or provincial manor. Stripped of all allusive
values, it exists in its own time-space continuum, location unspecified,
historically, geographically and chronologically adrift. Robbe-Grillet is not trying
to convince us of its existence in the real world nor even trying to make us see it
in the usual way, but using it, as we discover later, both to destroy our
customary perceptions and to reveal indirectly the inner tensions of his
narrator:
Maintenant Iornbredu pilier-le pilier qui soutient Iangle sud-ouest d u toit-divise
en deux parties dgales Iangle correspondant de la terrasse. Cette terrasse est une
large galerie couverte, entourant la rnaison sur trois de ses c6tds. Cornrne sa
largeur est la rnerne dans la portion rnddiane et dans les branches latdrales, le trait
dornbre projet6 par le pilier arrive exacternent au coin de la rnaison; rnais il sarrete
Ib. car seules les dalles de la terrasse sont atteintes par le soleil. qui se trouve
encore trop haut dans le ciel.

Superficially the three passages cited are similar: each describes a concrete
reality observed in some detail and with considerable precision. Yet this very
precision is where Robbe-Grillet and Balzac diverge. Balzac accumulates, piling
object upon object, detail upon detail, in a proliferation of qualities and values
until he achieves a general effect. In contrast it is difficult to think of a single
scene in Robbe-Grillets novels in which there is an abundance of objects or any
implied value at ail. A few objects in an essentially simple scene are refined and
dissected until the setting emerges not as characterized or impressionistically
defined, but rather as a system of geometric functions. The geometric and
situational language used at times by Balzac establishes objects in their external
relations one to the other-Mme Vauquers boarding house is at such-and-such
a spot on the rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevikve, the house is at right angles to the
street, a sandy walkway parallels the faGade, and so forth. Above the arch of
Grandets doorway there is a bas-relief surmounted by a protruding plinth . . .
etc. Depth perspectives are thus established which coincide with Balzacs concept of character and plot. Robbe-Grillets backgrounds have no such function.
The geometry of his descriptions remains mathematical, abstract and in the end
non-representational. Normal perspective disappears as depth relations resolve
themselves into surfaces and planes. The pillar at the south-west corner of the
roof divides the corresponding angle of the terrace into two equal halves; since
the length of the terrace is the same in its median part as it is in the lateral
branches, the shadow reaches precisely to the corner of the house, etc. In other
words, objects are described in terms of their geometric functions and not as
elements which can be situated in visually distinct depth perspectives. The
resulting abstract structure of Robbe-Grillets backgrounds initiates a reality

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213

which is dependent upon its own logic and not upon any resemblance to the
natural world in contrast to the description of Gobsecks room, the antiquarians
shop in La Peau de Chagrin or Birotteaus renovations. The section of tomato
in Les Gommes, the dock in Le Voyeur, the streets and rooms in Dons le
labyrinthe, the maison d e rendez-vous and its garden, all reduce the overt
appearance of natural or man-made backgrounds to synergetic systems of interacting lines and forces because a different concept of the physical world leads
Robbe-Grillet away from Balzacs techniques into a presentation generally
devoid of color, figurative language, anthropomorphization or affective
vocabulary.
Balzacs settings charged with meaning both explicit and implicit correspond
to an action and characters defined in perspective and depth (although not
always successfully). Robbe-Grillets backgrounds with their denaturalized
objects d o not even carry the normal sense of the things which they detail
(houses are to be lived in, tomatoes are to be eaten, etc.). Objects seem independent of their human uses as Roland Barthes has observed.6 In this way
setting reflects the minimal use of anecdote, action and characterization in his
novels through the destruction of meaningful content. The setting appears at
any given moment as a flat surface devoid of anthropomorphic meaning, a
formal arrangement of planes which refuses emotional and psychological
significance and which destroys three dimensional space. There is no depth
perspective in visual terms as there is no profundity in terms of the significance
of objects and decors. A phrase in Dons le labyrinthe (Paris: Union Gkngrale
&Editions, 10118, 1969) sums it up thusly: au lieu des perspectives spectaculaires auxquelles ces enfilades d e maisons devraient donner naissance, il
ny a quun entrecroisement d e lignes sans signification, la neige qui continue
d e tomber Btant au paysage tout son relief. . . . (p. 16).
The physical world is simply there and the form alone is what matters, the
way in which the lines and surfaces intersect, parallel each other, and so forth:
Le bord de pierre-une ar&tevive, oblique, b Iintersection de deux plans perpendiculaires: la paroi verticale fuyant tout droit vers le quai et la rampe qui rejoint le
haut de la digue-se prolonge 2 son extremite superieure en haut de la digue. par
une ligne horizontale fuyant tout droit vers le quai.7

Although this is a literal description of what is seen, it creates at the same

time a pattern of lines whose order, unity and logic lie in the articulation of its
various component parts: oblique, A Iintersection d e deux plans, perpendiculaires, tout droit vers le quai, qui rejoint, horizontale. The description is not of objects finally but of their abstract structures and their relationships. This is also true of Robbe-Grillets descriptions even when no specifically
geometric vocabulary is used. Where Balzacs explanatory setting stands in
relation to action and character through its contentual element, Robbe-Grillets
descriptive background derives its meaning from its articulation and distribution
within the overall formal structure.

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One can say that because of this difference almost any given background in
Balzac could be replaced by any other background with the same or similar
contentual qualities without disruption to the sense of the novel. The flowers
mentioned above could be other flowers, the faGade of Grandets house could
be architecturally altered without damaging the sense of the novel because the
constituent elements of Balzacs novels d o not stand in formal relationship one
to the other but depend rather upon a common content.
Robbe-Grillets descriptions on the other hand could not be changed without
radically altering the fundamental structure and consequently the sense of his
novels because their meaning derives from their precise form and position in
the structure of the whole. The engraving hanging in the room occupied by the
narrator in Darp le labyrinthe gradually assumes its meaning through assimilation into the real decor which surrounds it, the two becoming so intermingled
that differentiation after a time becomes impossible. The engraving per se is
meaningless except in its formal relationships with the other elements of the
novel which in this case provide the external point of reference as the real
world does for a Balzac novel.
La Jalousie, to take another example, depends upon particular angles and
planes for the revelation of its psychological and thematic content although
such content does not and cannot exist a priori and apart from the formal
relationships which are created in each readers private perceptions as he reads.
The first few lines of the novel cited above are not simply an objective view of a
particular house although this is not apparent until the passage can be placed
within a wider context.
Unlike the psychological implications which are a part of Balzacs
backgrounds, the psychological significance of the setting in La Jalousie is only
gradually discovered by the attentive reader through a slow accumulation of
geometric forms as seen within a severely limited focus. Only when the larger
system has been grasped can the meaning of any part be manifest. Because the
natural world is not perceived as significant in itself but rather in its abstract and
formal arrangement. Robbe-Grillets novels demand an intellectual rather than
a sense perception of the setting. Through the formal relationships of elements
within a given scene and the overall articulation of scenes within a novel like La
Jalousie an emotional tension is created and revealed which conveys the
jealousy and sexual fantasies of the husband. The rows of banana plants, the
chairs arranged on the veranda, the ice cube melting in a glass, the layout of the
house, these elements in themselves reveal nothing about A and Franck or the
observing eye. Yet the mental patterns formed by their relationships draw the
reader into the novel and force him to find a significance based upon his own
perceptions. Any other plantation house, any other set of objects, would have
meant another novel since their points of contact could not have been the
same, nor their effect upon the reader. The physical background in Dons le
lobyrinthe or Lo maison d e rendez-uous functions in much the same way and is
closely tied as it is in La Jalousie to the problem of distance.

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The distance Balzac establishes aims at an atmosphere of factual reality

through its detachment and its self-conscious mimetism: . . . vous la voyez
coup& dans sa profondeur. , . (Goriot, p. 8).All observers of the scene will
see roughly the same thing. The physical world is presented from a distance as
if observed by a n interested and yet uninvolved observer in an impressionistic
manner, whether it be for the revelation of character and situation or the creation of an atmosphere. Omniscient narrator and fictional personae who think
aloud (Rastignacs oc6an d e boue, Goriot. p. 276) seem to take the same
distance upon reality.
Robbe-Grillets descriptions on the contrary even when third person as in Les
Gommes or at times Le Voyeur, are close-in, observed by an eye which is
totally committed yet seemingly objective inasmuch as overt coloring and
analogy are usually excluded. It is the selection and ordering of, in themselves,
objective fragments of perceptual experience which allow action and characters
to exist. The plantation in La Jalousie may be ugly or beautiful; no opinion is
either expressed or implied. In any case such an opinion would be irrelevant.
The subjective effect so much discussed by the critics comes rather from the
deforming closeness, intensity and frequency of the elements used. This
precision of detail obscures the natural world as the microscope fractures the
surface of objects. (Comparisons have sometimes been made with the
techniques of magic realism.) So exact is it that the seemingly objective
existence of the world of appearances is destroyed leaving in its wake an abstract pattern whose truth is unrelated to verifiable sense data. La Jalousie like
the other works of Robbe-Grillet could not exist without this fracturing of appearances and, on a larger scale, narration so that the reader must focus on
relationships and systems rather than on self-contained significances. It is only
through the things which register upon the eye of the psychotic narrator in La
Jalousie for example, and the gradual accumulation of these geometric
molecular images that the emotions he experiences can be conveyed. The
erotic fantasies of Mathias in Le Voyeur are similarly developed through certain
recurring aspects of his environment such as the much analysed figure-eights.
Reality is refracted rather than reflected through the choices made necessary by
the nature of the observing consciousness. Moving back from the fragments
presented the reader reconstructs the observing eye and experiences a set of
concomitant emotions.8
While there may be some development in a limited sense when Balzac continues to add details to a previously described object or setting the meaning of
the text is not dependent upon structural accumulations and overlaps as in
Robbe-Grillet. The overall effect is fixed by our initial impression and further
details are simply meant to add their weight to the original treatment: I1 est
maintenant (after 18 pages) facile d e comprendre toute la valeur d e ce mot: la
maison d M . Grandet. cette maison, pble. froide, silencieuse, situ6e en haut de
la ville. et abritQepar les ruines des remparts. Perspectives are thus provided
through the situation in narrative (as well as real) time and space of objects and

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Kentucky Romance Quarterly

decors. By continually proving the existence of Grandet and his environment,

Balzac affirms the reality of a single external world subject of course to time and
physical process, but continuous and comprehensible as well.
The return to previously mentioned scenes and objects in Robbe-Grillets
novels is entirely different in that it destroys any sense of perspective, clarity or
absolute. Previous impressions are radically modified, even contradicted, as
images and scenes are laid upon one another until the lines for all their individual precision blur and like the jealous husband or the wandering soldier we
cannot be sure where obsession ends and external reality begins. The canals in
Les Gommes. the chairs arranged on the terrace in La Jalousie, the streets and
buildings in Dans le labyrinthe return again and again modified at each encounter in the consciousness of the narrator until the common denominators,
oppositions and modifications reveal a significance within a larger system of
lines and forces.
Although at first glance then Robbe-Grillets descriptions, like Balzacs, may
seem to hold a mirror up to the physical world, the organization into volumes
and planes soon destroys any mimetic effect. Concrete language leads into the
realm of the non-figurative and the non-representational within each given
frame as each frame in turn loses its momentarily imitative quality within the
patterns of the whole. The reader is confronted with material so specific and
well ordered in its relationships that its formal qualities subvert his accepted notions of meaning and force an unaccustomed apprehension of the scene
presented.
Perhaps Wilhelm Worringers notion of abstraction and empathy provides
some clue to the finally opposed realisms Balzac and R~bbe-Grillet.~
According to Worringer the urge to empathy, that is. naturalistic, organic,
representational art forms is the result of an accommodation and confidence
between man and the phenomena of the physical universe: _. .the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence
between man and the phenomena of the external world. . . (p. 15).In such a
situation the artist expresses his feelings about the world through the projection
into his work of the lines and forms of the organically vital. The nineteenth century with its faith in material progress on the one hand and its sense of mans
place within the cosmic forces of nature on the other (the romantics,
Baudelaires correspondances, Balzacs Swedenborgian mysticism, the concept of pathetic fallacy) would suggest in Worringers terms an urge to empathy and art forms imitative of the natural world.
Balzacs decors would seem to coincide with this concept of empathy. They
express through their explicit mimetism a belief in the organic complicity of man
and the natural world. Man shapes the environment in his own image, and the
environment in turn exerts powerful influences upon man in a continuing symbiotic process. Through the elaboration of a fictional setting within not only
each novel but the series of novels which comprises La Comedie humaine
Balzac aims at a complete and rational description of an integrated physical

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SpatialPerception and the Mimetic Mode

217

world in which each part has its place and contributes its weight to the overall
system. Technically this leads in individual descriptive passages to the development of dominants supported or formed by clusters of related elements bound
together in a single impression and functioning as an organic whole. Such
passages are dependent for the most part upon massing effects and affective
techniques, a feeling-oneself-into the forms of the natural world in Worringers terminology, in which the artists attempts to approximate his work to
the facts of organic experience correspond to mans vision of himself in and of
the world.
Robbe-Grillets physical world on the other hand seems to correspond to
Worringers notion of abstraction, that is, the artistic impulse which reveals
through linear and geometric forms a metaphysical conflict inspired in man by a
dread of the obscure, entangled, inexplicable and uncontrollable phenomena
of the outside world (absurd man in an absurd universe?), in particular an immense dread of space. lo The suppression of three dimensionality through the
use of simple line and its development in purely geometric and planimetric
regularity, Worringer believes, is the inevitable response to this fear of the
obscurity and entanglement of phenomena in space for it is space which links
things to one another and gives them their relativity. By removing the object
from its natural context, by purifying it of its dependence on life, by approximating it to its absolute value, the artist seeks relief from the flux of appearances and the relativity of meaning: The primal artistic impulse has
nothing to d o with the rendering of nature. It seeks after pure abstraction as the
only possibility of repose within the obscurity and confusion of the world picture
and creates out of itself, with instinctive necessity, geometric abstraction (p.

44).
So too Robbe-Grillet (like the Cubists) seeks an equilibrium not to be found in
the capriciousness of the organic and an approximation to naturalistic forms.
By suppressing three dimensional space within the novel as painters and
sculptors had done long since, Robbe-Grillet realizes formally the work of arts
separation from contentual and contextual significance and endeavours to find
absolute forms within the perceptual data of lived experience.
Robbe-Grillets novels all reveal this struggle to isolate individual elements, to
see volumes and outlines and to apprehend the thing-in-itself, the attempt to
fix the external world, to find certainty and repose in a universe which refuses
human values and meanings. This is true at the level of the rCcit as well as in the
broader sense with which we are concerned here. But the solid, tangible,
discrete entities which make up at the start, as in Balzacs novels, his closed and
self-sufficient world are immediately questioned, negated, destroyed through
the reduction of both objects and scenes to systems of relationships which articulate in geometric schemata surfaces. contours and interfaces, and which
eliminate the referential and the contentual from the elements of the physical
decor. (As in the Baroque no single integrating perspective is privileged; as in

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Cubism a multiplicity of theoretically simultaneous and often contradictory

views is proposed.)
Internally the absolute values sought for through the precision and intensity
of the descriptive passages lead to a necessary and non-referential abstraction
of individual material elements in their tangible mimetic concreteness. Repetitions, superpositions and overlaps continue this evacuation of anthropornorphic meaning within the larger narrative context by substituting for a clear and
understandable presentation of physical decor, in perspective, a setting which
suppresses the cognate-organic in order to focus upon abstract relationships.
The intensity and precision of descriptive detail and the repetitions and overlaps
of both objects and scenes are upon the narrative and structural plane no other
than the working out of a new set of perceptual values in which the desired
clear material individuality of objects, not in their organic similitude but in their
absolute value, is the goal of artistic volition and psychic necessity.
By extracting (abstracting) in this way from the natural forms of the physical
world and human experience their structures and formal relationships to the
detriment of anthropomorphic and organic values Robbe-Grillet expresses a
fundamental psychic condition of our time. The will to abstraction coincides
with mans increasing doubts about the certainties of empirical knowledge and
the usefulness of human perception as an agent of understanding, the final
resignation of knowledge, as Worringer puts it.
While settings mirror the reassuring existence of an understandable world,
however cruel, in Balzacs novels they become in the works of Robbe-Grillet
signs of emotional, psychological and above all perceptual rupture and instability which transcend their own simple existence in the direction of an eternal here
and now freed from appearances and the contingency of the organic, subject
only to the laws of geometric abstraction.
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

NOTES
1. I cannot agree with A . J. Mount in The Physical Setting in Balzacs Comedie humaine. University of Hull Occasional Papers in Modern Languages, n o 2 (Hull: Univ. of
Hull Publications. 1966).p. 27. who opposes this view of the links between setting and
character: . . . the widely accepted view that physical background is an active ingredient
in the drama, forming character and determining action does not bear close examination
2. Pour un nouueau roman (Paris: Gallimard. Collection IdCes. 1963).p . 21.
3. LePPre Goriot (Paris: Garnier. 1963).p . 7 .
4. Eug6nie Grandet (ParisSarnier. 1961).p. 1
5. La Jalousie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. 1957),p. 1.
6. Essais Critiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1964).p 31.
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7. Le Voyeur (Paris: Les Editions d e Minuit. 1954, p. 13.

8. For a detailed description of narrative and temporal structure in La Jalousie see
Bruce Morrissettes Les romans de Robbe-Griller (Paris: Les Editions d e Minuit. 1963),
pp. 111-147.
9. Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International
Universities Press, 1953),pp. 3-48.
10. Worringer proposes the same psychic conditions at the root of the will to form in
the abstract art of primitives and the abstraction in art of certain highly developed civilizations.
11. 1 am indebted in a general way for parts of my discussion of the geometric aspects
of Robbe-Grillets descriptions to Elly JaffP-Freem. Alain Robbe-Griller et la peinture
cubiste (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1966).