The Target (review)

A painting by Jasper Johns of a bulls-eye, aptly if unimaginatively entitled “The Target,” appears on the dust jacket of a book with the same title. The book contains eight color plates of paintings exhibited in a 1978 Johns show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, accompanied by a short fictional narrative written for the exhibit catalogue by New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. That narrative, entitled “La Cible,” is translated here as “The Target.” Robbe-Grillet’s text was unorthodox, to say the least: “La Cible” no more “introduced” the exhibit than Johns’s paintings “illustrated” the text. Rather, Robbe-Grillet used the paintings as jumping off points or “generators” for his own inventions, which he also incorporated into a full-length novel, Souvenirs du triangle d’or.¹ In The Target, as in the original catalogue, neither the paintings nor the fiction is subordinated, nor are the two simply juxtaposed. Instead, verbal and visual texts are placed into dialogue, which is what makes this volume particularly useful to comparatists.

This virtual conversation between Robbe-Grillet and Johns is not comparative in any traditional or obvious sense, but fortunately, the discussion has a wise and informed moderator. Already the author of several studies of Robbe-Grillet and here at once translator, editor, and exegete, Ben Stoltzfus mobilizes an impressive array of critical approaches to unpack the many-layered connections between Johns’s paintings and Robbe-Grillet’s text. In his “Jasper Johns and Alain Robbe-Grillet: An Interarts Essay,” Stoltzfus traces Robbe-Grillet’s creative genealogy through Pop Art to the Surrealists and beyond. He also selected fifty additional black-and-white reproductions of Johns’s works for inclusion in the volume to accompany his essay. The Target can profitably be read as a companion volume to La Belle Captive (1975), a novel in which Robbe-Grillet was similarly inspired by a series of paintings by René Magritte. In that case too, Stoltzfus provided both translation and enlightenment in the form of another critical study, “The Elusive Heroine: An Interarts Essay.”²

Stoltzfus uses linguistic and semiotic analysis to argue that Robbe-Grillet’s text and Johns’s paintings approach their respective media in analogous ways. Highly ironic and self-reflexive, both artists work in a meta-artistic frame to draw attention away from mimesis in order instead to engage the reader/viewer in the process of creating meaning. Both are aware (to cite a formula from Robbe-Grillet’s fellow New Novelist Jean Ricardou) that creation is not only the story of an adventure but also and simultaneously the adventure of a story.

That story emerges from reorganization of familiar material into new configurations, a process (an adventure) that Stoltzfus elucidates with the help of psychoanalysis and chaos theory. Special attention is given to the notion of “strange attractors,” which resemble unconscious or hidden generators of images and text. Stoltzfus identifies core motifs that Robbe-Grillet adapts from Johns, and he traces both artists’ focus on objects such as targets and cells in all their various manifestations, including psychic processes and organic forms. By manipulating these and other motifs, the two artists activate and recycle cultural myths, bringing them to the surface of consciousness.

Finally, Stoltzfus argues compellingly for the political implications and even the overt revolutionary potential of Johns’s and Robbe-Grillet’s experimental artistic production. By breaking the rules of realistic representation and radically reordering received realities, he maintains, the two artists demonstrate the malleability of the world and our power to transform it. In showing “that it is possible to deviate from a culture’s prescribed order” (76) art has the capacity to “dislocate the codes” (93) and to “alter our habits and expectations” (97). It can challenge consumer culture, for example, by engaging the reader/viewer’s active participation and thus showing that the point of art is “not to consume meaning, but to produce it” (79). Stoltzfus bravely takes on Robbe-Grillet’s notorious misogyny and asks...