Marienbad

The French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died earlier this year and whose reputation rests for being the pope of the nouveau roman, published La jalousie in 1957. The title seems to play on the double meaning of jalousie in French: the first is jealousy, and the second refers to a vertical blind, or a Venetian blind, as it’s sometimes called. The nameless protagonist is here simply observing meticulously—every object, every gesture, every shade. Which is precisely what brings the double meaning of jealousy together: meticulous observation is neither free nor disinterested, as it is guided by a sense of obsession and rivalry towards an object, on one hand, and the invisible medium that makes observation possible and lucrative—sort of blind, where the observed cannot see the observer, or where the observer remains for the most part invisible.

L’année dernière à Marienbad, which was scripted by Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais in 1961, has now been released in a restored version in the US (and playing this week at the Music Box in Chicago). I saw it for the first time in a ciné-club in the early years of civil-war Beirut, when I was sophomore/junior in chemistry/physics, and didn’t make much of it. But when I had a second look at it yesterday, in its new US release, Robbe-Grillet’s jalousie kept creeping in to my mind.

Marienbad may be complicated or simple, depending on how much you make out of it. But one thing is certain: it is solely narrated from the viewpoint of a single narrator, a handsome middle-aged man with an Italian accent, and designated as X throughout the film. By contrast we hardly know anything of A, a slightly younger woman than X, except for what X phantasizes about her in his monologue. In effect, X’s monologue is obsessive, systematic, and precise in its target: A. X is therefore the observer’s guide: not only is he the one to obsessively observe A continuously, but we observe A, the château and its world, and its aristocratic bourgeois guests, through the eyes—and consciousness—of X. In other words, we’re trapped to the screen through his eyes and consciousness—perhaps more to the latter than the former. In short, the screen is X’s consciousness.

X’s obsessive consciousness runs twofold. At one level, and that’s the essence of the film, he is obsessed with A, her gestures, thoughts, body, posture, and the few things she has to say. One might think that it’s all driven by pure jealousy (hence my connection with jalousie), but, in the final analysis, what really matters is how you come to perceive a jealous act. Jealousy could be perceived as a simple rivalry over a woman, and there’s something to suggest that kind of direction: a mid-aged man, identified as M, positioning himself as a rival-lover-cum-husband, is portrayed as linked to A in some obscure relationship. But even though his relation to X turns sour, it does not seem to guide X’s obsessive lust. Indeed, X’s obsessive gaze seems to suggest that a man’s lust for a woman is jalousie tout court, whether there is a rival lover or not. That’s where jalousie and Marienbad come together: they both portray jealousy the act (feeling) per se, and the process (act) of observing the desired object. The two combined come to represent the consciousness of that main protagonist beleaguerer.

Marienbad is therefore all about seeing, phantasizing, and constructing a selective type of consciousness out of the fragmented images within the space-time continuum. X’s memory is therefore his consciousness, which translates as his obsessiveness with A. X’s gaze reconstructs in his consciousness A’s space-time continuum, as we only get to “know” through X’s jalousie. Otherwise, A’s attitude—confronted with X’s lust and perseverance—is callous at best, as she keeps begging him with the same supplice: “Mais, je vous en prie, laissez-moi!” That kind of leave-me-alone attitude only underscores her indifference, probably finding X’s insistence unattractive, and his character boorish. But whatever that may be, she does not have any memory: not only she can’t remember anything, but there is no “consciousness” of anything in her. Only those infested with that jalousie sickness—that is, who suffer for being who they are, and for falling prey to a beloved object—do enjoy that luxury of memory, and of space-time recollection. What in effect the film portrays accurately—in a documentary fashion—are X’s specific recollections, which are all related to A. Once we step “outside” what A may be doing, feeling, or thinking, we’re into the pure repetition of le même. In effect, X’s recollections of the château, its entourage and clients, are one of sameness: the same gestures, postures, bodies, and utterances, from one year to another. Memory seems here incapable of distinguishing anything—or rather of naming anything with accuracy—hence that infernal sameness: only A makes—creates—the difference. If A is différence (or différance), the others (les autres, including le château) are répétition. At the very end of the film, the château’s massive garden is described by the narrator as “typically French,” that is, without all the natural elements, like flowers and trees, that would make it lively, non-symmetrical, and without the infinite mathematical repetitiveness. In other words, the garden is like the château itself, its endless unpopulated corridors, symmetries, rooms, and guests: it’s all about good manners, mathematical symmetry, and bourgeois obtuse mannerisms. When X engages with M in a public “fight,” it’s through well ordered games like matches and dominoes.

Only X’s obsessiveness with A—his consciousness of her and her time-space—disrupts that enduring mathematical order. It is that obsessive consciousness of the observer who suffers which disrupts that order—in one’s mind—through an act of violence—that of intruding into another’s space-time. There are even few scattered scenes in A’s bedroom—scenes that A herself cannot or pretend not to remember—that do suggest that X was prying on her from an unknown location (through a jalousie? A Blue Velvet kind of voyeurism?): even in that seemingly “private” space it is indeed the suffering observer that remembers in a non-linear non-chronological space-time. As that kind of voyeurism verges on violence, there is a scene where violence is physically perpetrated, when M, the jealous lover-cum-husband shoots A. But, again, such a scene, like many others, is solely from X’s perspective, in that awkward reality-fiction combination that determines the assortment of events in a peculiar space-time configuration (and there’s no point in asking where reality begins, and where fiction ends). What’s interesting about that scene, where A is shot while lying in bed, is the physicality of violence, which in other scenes never moves beyond touching or fondling A. It has been reported that to Robbe-Grillet X’s attitude is that of a rapist, that is, one to which the erotic-sexual gaze receives its satisfaction only through (ritualized) sexual violence. Be that as it may, one can see that X’s type of consciousness is one of lust and suffering, which borders on violence, whether it consummates itself in an act of rape or not. But then X’s order becomes a mathematical order all by itself, like its surroundings, obsessively repeating its own gestures, appearances, and utterances.