Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands

5. Intoxicating Meaning

111 V Intoxicating Meaning Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy If it intoxicates me, nonmeaning indeed has this meaning—it intoxicates me. Georges Bataille Published in 1957, as the nouveau roman was rising on the Parisian literary scene, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jealousy produced in many of its first readers a reaction of puzzlement and consternation. One critic from the newspaper Le Monde believed “that he had surely received a copy whose pages had been mixed up by the printer, that it was a jumbled mess.”1 Jealousy, in many ways, can be said to illustrate Robbe-Grillet’s modernist, if not postmodernist, bias against classical realism and narration,2 his view that “tell[ing] a story has become strictly impossible [raconter est devenu proprement impossible].”3 Making these remarks in an article aptly entitled “On Several Obsolete Notions,” published the same year as Jealousy and republished a few years later in his influential 1963 manifesto For a New Novel, Robbe-Grillet made clear his intention to renovate both the novel form and the critical reading practices used in approaching the genre as a whole. Robbe-Grillet’s call for a radicalization of the novel—for a “new novel” that “refuses to conform to our habits of apprehension and to our classification ”4 —proved more difficult to translate into new protocols of reading, however, and the question of how one can or should read Jealousy’s unruliness, its intentional challenge to hermeneutic containment and cognitive mastery, remains open. The question of how to respond to a work that stubbornly 112 Intoxicating Meaning insists on its refractory otherness—a question that Jealousy itself allegorizes or stages in several key scenes—is not just an intellectual or epistemological challenge but also an ethical one. Taking up this challenge, this chapter looks awry at the reception of Robbe-Grillet’s work—viewing the familiar fault lines in criticism askance—identifying the forms of readerly responsibility that the novel stages and elicits, and evaluating the very possibility of meeting the work’s ethical and interpretive demands. Another Realism or Realism’s Other “No novel, no matter how avant-garde, can succeed without engaging its readers’ desires and expectations, and readers cannot desire or expect anything in a world totally alien from their own,” writes Peter J. Rabinowitz.5 Jealousy unmistakably engages its readers’ desires and expectations, yet how this acknowledgment relates back to the novel’s strangeness is a decidedly more complicated question. Confronted with Jealousy’s alien and alienating unruliness, some critics have sought to tame the novel—that is, to fix its promiscuous slippage of meaning—through recourse to well-established modes of inquiry. In his 1963 work, The Novels of Robbe-Grillet, Bruce Morrissette offered the first systematic and explanatory study of the novel, basing his reading in part on the authority of its jacket blurb, which he faithfully paraphrased as follows: “The story with its three characters—the husband, the wife, the presumed lover—is ‘narrated’ by the husband, a tropical planter who, from the vantage points in his banana plantation house, surrounded on three sides by its wide veranda, suspiciously keeps watch over his wife.”6 According to Morrissette, two chronologies control the novel’s action: an external chronology (which is impossible to determine) and a chronology of the husband’s psychological states. The novel’s disconcerting chronological impasses can be explained as symptoms of the inner psychic unity governing the order of the novel’s events. This psychic unity ultimately refers us to a stable, coherent subject and a readable subject/work, one situated in the tradition of the psychological novel. Jealousy’s initial disturbing effects are thus eliminated through a critical rereading, one that naturalizes the contradictions and restores the comforting sense of comprehension and mastery. Prioritizing referential interpretation does not necessarily lead to a psychological reading of Jealousy, however. In his 1973 Lecture politique du roman (Political Reading of the Novel), Jacques Leenhardt proposed an illuminating 113 Intoxicating Meaning sociological analysis of the novel, unsettling Morrissette’s influential contention that Jealousy is about erotic jealousy, and more specifically, about the psychic reality of a jealous husband. Leenhardt’s Marxist reading of Jealousy purports to make visible what Fredric Jameson describes as the novel’s language or, to be more precise, its signifiers’ “material and referential preconditions.”7 Privileging the social, in turn, enables the reader to escape the psychologization of the husband in order...