The Voyeur

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Howard

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780802190567
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The winner of the Prix des Critiques from the French avant-garde author of Jealousy. "Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution in the novel" (Claude Mauriac, cultural critic for Le Figaro).
 
Mathias, a timorous, ineffectual traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth after a long absence. Two days later, a thirteen-year-old girl is found drowned and mutilated. With eerie precision, Robbe-Grillet puts us at the scene of the crime and takes us inside Mathias's mind, artfully enlisting us as detective hot on the trail of a homicidal maniac. A triumphant display of the techniques of the "new novel," The Voyeur achieves the impossible feat of keeping us utterly engrossed in the mystery of the child's murder while systematically raising doubts about whether it really occurred.
 
"The suspense . . . keeps us on tenterhooks." — The New York Times Book Review
 
"I can think of no other writer who can render the banal so fearfully fantastic. In the subtlest, slyest, and most sheerly delightful way he persuades us to look anew at the commonplace." — Books and Bookmen
 
Praise for Alain Robbe-Grillet
 
"Robbe-Grillet's theories constitute the most ambitious aesthetic program since Surrealism." —John Updike, Pulitzer Prize–winner
 
"Robbe-Grillet is important because he has attacked the last bastion of the traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space." —Roland Barthes, influential literary theorist
 
"Robbe-Grillet was a master at conveying human misunderstanding." —Bernard-Henri Lévy, public intellectual, author, and filmmaker
 
"I doubt that fiction as art can any longer be seriously discussed without Robbe-Grillet." — The New York Times

III

THE NEW advertisement represented a landscape.

At least Mathias thought he could make out a moor dotted with clumps of bushes in its interlacing lines, but something else must have been superimposed: here and there certain outlines or patches of color appeared which did not seem to be part of the original design. On the other hand they could not be said to constitute another drawing entirely; they appeared to have no relation to one another, and it was impossible to guess their intention. They succeeded, in any case, in so blurring the configurations of the moor that it was doubtful whether the poster represented a landscape at all.

On the upper section appeared the names of the leading actors—foreign names Mathias thought he had already seen many times, but which he associated with no particular faces. Underneath was spread in huge letters what must have been the name of the film: “Monsieur X on the Double Circuit.” Not conforming to the trends of recent productions, this title—which was scarcely enticing, having little or no relation to anything human—provided remarkably little information about what type of film it described. Perhaps it was a detective story, or a thriller.

Attempting once again to decipher the network of curves and angles, Mathias now recognized nothing at all—it was impossible to decide whether there were two different images superimposed, or just one, or three, or even more.

He stepped back to get a better look at the bulletin-board as a whole, but the more he examined it the more vague, shifting, and incomprehensible it seemed. There were performances on Saturday night and Sunday, not before; he would be unable to see the film, since he intended to leave Friday afternoon.

“Good-looking sign, isn’t it?” said a voice he knew.

Mathias raised his eyes. Above the bulletin-board the garage-man’s head had appeared in the doorway.

“That one, yes! …” the salesman began, cautiously.

“Wonder where they get colors like those,” the other continued.

Did this mean that he had discovered what the lines were supposed to represent?

“Here’s your bicycle,” said Mathias. “It’s just played me a nasty trick!”

“I’m not surprised,” the garageman returned, still smiling. “All these new makes are the same—they’re shiny enough, but no good when you need them.”

The salesman recounted his misfortune: he had just missed the boat by a few seconds because of this chain, which at the last minute had made him lose five precious minutes.

The garageman found the incident so commonplace he did not even listen to him. He asked instead: “You came from the pier?”

“Just now …”

“Then you were going to take the bicycle with you?” the man exclaimed as jovially as before.

Mathias explained that he had stopped by the tobacco shop beforehand to leave the bicycle and pay for its use; but he had found no one there. As he returned to the square—not knowing what to do next—he had heard the boat’s last whistle, the one that meant the gangway was about to be closed, so he had headed toward the pier—not hurrying, since it was too late—just to watch the little steamer pull out—to have something to do, really …

“Yes,” the man said, “I saw you. I was there too, at the end of the pier.”

“Now I’m going to need a room until Friday. Where can I find one?”

The garageman seemed to be thinking it over.

“The boat left at least five minutes late today,” he said, after a rather long silence.

Of course there was no hotel on the island, not even a rooming house. From time to time people rented an empty room, but it was difficult living in someone else’s house, and there were really no conveniences. The best solution, as far as finding out what was available at the moment, was to ask at the café “A l’Espérance,” on the quay. Then the salesman asked how much he owed for the bicycle and paid the twenty crowns he was charged. In consideration of the bicycle’s newness, on the one hand, and its irregular operation on the other, it was difficult to say whether this was cheap or expensive.

“Wait a minute,” the tobacconist continued, “there’s the Widow Leduc just nearby—she used to have a good room to rent out; but she’s off her head today, ever since her kid disappeared. You’d better leave her alone.”

“Disappeared?” the salesman asked. “Madame Leduc is an old friend; I saw her only this morning. I hope nothing has happened …”

“It’s that little Jacqueline again: they’ve been looking for her since noon, but no one can find her.”

“She can’t be far, after all! The island isn’t so big as that!”

The meadows and the moor, the potato fields, the edge of the fields, the hollows in the cliff, the sand, the rocks, the sea …

“Don’t fool yourself,” said the man, winking at him. “Someone knows where she is.”

Mathias did not dare leave. He had waited too long again. And now he was obliged to struggle a second time with silences that threatened to riddle the conversation at every turn: “Then that was it,” he said, “that business with the sheep they were talking about at Black Rocks?”

“Yes, that’s it—she was tending the sheep, but the wolf got the shepherdess!” etc…. etc….

And also: “At thirteen! It’s really a shame”—“She’s got a devil inside her”—“A wild animal!”—“Children are a lot of trouble”—“She deserves to be….”

There was no reason for it to stop. Mathias said something, the man answered, Mathias answered that. The man said something, Mathias answered. Mathias said something, Mathias answered. Little Jacqueline was walking along the path on top of the cliff, showing off her delicate, scandalous silhouette. In the hollows, sheltered from the wind, in the long meadow grass, under the hedges, against the trunk of a pine, she stopped and slowly ran her fingertips over her hair, her neck, her shoulders …

She always came home to sleep—the last house as you left town on the road to the big lighthouse. Tonight, when Mathias would climb upstairs to his room, having said goodnight to the mother and the two older sisters, holding his lighted candle in front of him in his right hand and in his left his little suitcase in which he had carefully stored the cord, raising his head—he would see, a few steps higher, showing him the way up the dark staircase, so slender in her little black peasant girl’s dress, Violet as a child…. Violet! Violet! Violet!

He pushed open the door of the café. Three sailors—one almost a boy and two older men—were sitting at a table drinking red wine. Behind the counter the girl with the timorous expression of a dog that had been whipped was leaning against the doorway of the room back of the bar, her wrists behind the small of her back. Mathias passed his hand in front of his eyes.

He asked for a room. Without a word she preceded him step by step up the narrow spiral of the suddenly darkened second staircase, gracefully slipping between the boxes and various utensils that blocked their passage. They reached the landing, the little vestibule, the room with the black and white tiling…. The bed had been made. The bed lamp on the night table was turned on, lighting more brightly the red material at the head of the bed, as well as several tiles, and the lambskin. On the dressing table among the jars and bottles, was the slightly tilted chromium-plated frame holding the photograph. Directly above it, the big oval mirror again reflected…. Mathias passed his hand in front of his eyes.

The girl had finally understood that he wanted a room as near the harbor as possible for three days. The lodging she suggested, and which he went to see at once, was not in the town proper, but just beyond, a house on the moor near the sea, just beyond the pier. This spot, despite its relative isolation, was nearer the pier than certain sections of the town itself—those, for instance, between the old harbor and the ruins of the fort.

Although of better appearance—cleaner certainly, and more frequently repainted and whitewashed than most the salesman had approached hitherto—the building, obviously the same age as the rest, presented identical physical features, the same simplified architecture: a ground floor with neither upper story nor dormers, and two identical facades, each with two small, almost square windows on either side of a low door. Facing the road—a secondary one which must have been the short cut to the village Mathias had visited before reaching Horses Point—the entrance was embellished with the same holly-leaf mahonias, here perhaps somewhat more flourishing.

Between the doors extended a rectilinear hallway onto which opened all four rooms. Mathias’ was the back one on the left, overlooking the cliff.

The cliff was not very high at this point—lower, in any case, than along the southwest beach or at the two promontories at either end of the island. On the right it fell away toward an indentation in the coast where the sea could be seen, perhaps a third of a mile away.

From the ridge where the face of the cliff began—opposite the house—to the house itself was a distance of no more than three hundred yards of gently rolling moors and a small garden that had been left fallow, although enclosed by barbed-wire attached to wooden fence posts. The whole landscape—low sky, patch of ocean, cliff, garden—was composed of various flat, lusterless, grayish hues.

The window that looked out on it was a yard wide and slightly higher—four panes of the same size with neither curtains nor shade; since it was deeply recessed in the thickness of the wall, the rather large room for which it was the only source of daylight remained virtually in darkness. Only the heavy little table wedged into the recess received enough light for him to write there—add up his accounts there—or draw there.

The rest of the room was in semidarkness. Its appointments further accentuated this defect: a dull-colored carpet and high, heavy pieces of dark furniture. The latter were crowded so close together along all four walls that there was some doubt whether this room was actually intended to be lived in or merely used as a storeroom for all the discarded furniture from the rest of the house. Especially noticeable were three immense cupboards, two side by side opposite the door to the hallway. They filled almost the whole of the rear wall, leaving just enough room for a modest dressing table—this last in the dimmest corner, to the left of the window from which it was separated by two straight chairs standing against the flowered wallpaper. On the other side of the window recess, two other chairs occupied a symmetrical position. But only three of the four chairs were of the same design.

Hence, starting at the window and proceeding left (that is, counter-clockwise), were a chair, another chair, the dressing table (in the corner), a third chair, a cherrywood bed (placed lengthwise against the wall), a tiny pedestal table with a fourth chair in front of it, a commode (in the third corner), the door to the hallway, a kind of drop-leaf table that could be used as a desk when the sides were extended, and finally the third cupboard, standing diagonally across the fourth corner with the fifth and sixth chairs next to it. It was in this last, most imposing, cupboard—which was always locked—that the shoebox which harbored his string collection was kept, on the right-hand side of the lowest shelf.

The girl’s body was discovered the following morning at low tide. Some fishermen—looking for the soft-shelled turtle crabs called “sleepers”—happened to find the body on the rocks under the crossroads.

The salesman heard the news while he was drinking an apéritif at the bar of the café “A l’Espérance.” The sailor who was telling the story seemed quite well informed as to the location, the posture, and the state of the body; but he was not one of the men who had found it, and he did not even say if he had seen it for himself. Furthermore, he seemed completely unmoved by what he was describing. It might as well have been a stuffed doll thrown over the cliff. The man was speaking slowly and with a certain concern for accuracy, furnishing—although sometimes in scarcely logical order—all the necessary material details and offering for each some plausible explanation. Everything was clear, obvious, banal.

Little Jacqueline was lying naked on a bed of brown seaweed among the big, round rocks. Doubtless the movement of the waves had undressed her, for it was unlikely that she had been drowned while swimming—in this weather, and at such a dangerous spot. She must have lost her balance playing at the edge of the cliff, which was very steep at this point. Perhaps she had even tried to reach the water by a more or less passable rock spur which ran down on the left. She must have missed her footing, or slipped, or tried to balance on too weak a point in the rock. She had been killed by the fall—of several yards—her slender neck broken.

The hypothesis that a sudden wave might have swept her off her feet during the rising tide was no more tenable than the supposition that she had drowned while swimming: there was very little water in her lungs—much less, certainly, than if she had drowned. Besides, there were wounds on her head and limbs which corresponded more closely to a ricocheting fall against stone outcroppings than to injuries sustained by a lifeless body tossed about by the sea. Nevertheless—as might be expected—on what remained of her flesh there were also a number of bruises which resembled the result of this kind of contact.

In any case, it was difficult for nonspecialists, even those accustomed to such accidents, to establish with any certitude the origin of the different wounds and abrasions found on the girl’s body; especially since the crabs, or the fish perhaps, had already begun their ravages at certain particularly tender spots. The fisherman thought that the body of an adult would have held out longer against them.

He doubted that a doctor would have anything else to say about the case, which in his opinion was unequivocal. By the same token the salesman learned that there was no doctor on the island and that the man who spoke in such a knowing way had served in the navy as a hospital attendant. There was only an old Civil Guard who as a rule confined himself to making out a death certificate.

The body had been brought to Madame Leduc’s house, along with two or three pieces of the girl’s clothing that had been scattered on the nearby rocks, among the seaweed. According to his informant, Madame Leduc had actually grown “rather calm” on learning what had become of her youngest daughter and the reason that had kept her from coming home. No one who witnessed the scene was surprised.

His audience—five other sailors, the proprietor, and the young barmaid—had listened to the entire account without once interrupting, merely nodding at the most decisive passages. Mathias contented himself with imitating them.

There was a pause at the end. Then the hospital attendant repeated elements of his story from first one part, then another, employing the same terms and constructing his sentences in the identical manner: “The hookers had already begun to nibble at the tenderest parts: the lips, the neck, the hands … other places too…. Only just begun, though: almost nothing. Or else it might have been a red eel, or a barbel …”

At last, after another silence, someone said: “It’s the devil that finally punished her!”

It was one of the sailors—a young one. Several murmurs rose around him—vague sounds, signifying neither acquiescence nor protest. Then everyone was still. On the other side of the glass door, beyond the cobbles and the mud, the water of the harbor was gray, flat, and lusterless. The sun had not reappeared.

Someone spoke up behind Mathias: “Maybe she was pushed—did you ever think of that—to make her fall…. She was fast on her feet, that girl”

This time the silence was longer still. The salesman turned around to face the room and searched every face to discover who had just spoken.

“Anyone can lose his balance,” the hospital attendant said.

Mathias emptied his glass and set it down again on the counter.

He looked at his right hand on the edge of the counter, next to the empty glass, and immediately concealed it in his duffle coat pocket. There it came in contact with the open pack of cigarettes. He took one out of the pack, still in his pocket, then put it in his mouth and lit it.

The smoke, expelled through his rounded lips, formed a great circle above the bar, slowly twisting in the calm air into two equal loops. As soon as possible Mathias would ask his landlady for a pair of scissors to cut these embarrassing nails; he did not want them to be this long for two days more. It was at that momen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Alain Robbe-Grillet
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• II
• III
• Back Cover