“I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Erasers is one of the most convoluted, complex, knotty novels a reader could possibly encounter, a novel that can be approached from multiple perspectives and on multiple levels, everything from an intricate detective mystery to a meditation on the circularity of time, from the phenomenology of perception to the story of Oedipus.
For the purpose of this review, I will focus on one aspect of The Erasers I have not come across in any of the commentary I’ve read by scholars, literary critics or book reviewers – the prevalence of ugliness in the city where the novel is set.
With its winding streets and system of canals, the novel’s city has been likened to Amsterdam, but any likeness to this beautiful, charming Dutch city ends there. The cold Northern European industrial city we encounter in The Erasers is ugly and creepy, lacking any trace of charm or warmth.
The main character, special agent Wallas, who travels to the city to solve a murder, repeatedly reflects on this lack of aesthetic attraction and beauty, as when we read: “a city completely barren of appeal for an art lover," and then again, “a huge stone building ornamented with scrolls and scallops, fortunately few in number – in short, of rather somber ugliness.” From Wallas’s multiple observations, this unnamed city’s stark ugliness can bring to my mind Golconda by the surrealist René Magritte, a painting of a cityscape raining men in black suits and bowlers, painted in the same year as the publication of The Erasers.
This unattractiveness also extends to the people inhabiting the city. Two men described in some detail are both fat and flabby and move in a stiff and mechanical way: first, the manager of the café, portrayed as follows: “A fat man is standing here, the manager . . . greenish, his features blurred, liverish, and fleshy in his aquarium.” Second, Laurent, the chief commissioner: “He is a short, plump man with a pink face and a bald skull . . . his overfed body shakes from fits of laughter.”
Tom, one of the condemned prisoners, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s story The Wall is such a flabby, fat man. Also, Antoine Roquentin, the main character in Sartre’s novel Nausea, describes the shaking hands of another fat man: “Then there was his hand like a fat white worm in my own hand. I dropped it almost immediately and the arm fell back flabbily.”
So, why am I highlighting these facts? Because I have the strong impression both Robbe-Grillet and Sartre (a great influence on the author) saw flab and fat as repulsive and ugly, a counter to the possibility of freedom and spontaneity and fluidity we can experience in our human embodiment.
In contradistinction, Wallas is a tall, calm young man with regular features and who walks with an elastic, confident gate. But at every turn Wallas encounters ugliness, even in an automat where there is a sign reading: “Please Hurry. Thank you.” And this sign is repeated many times on the white walls of the automat. How nauseating! Not surprisingly, Wallas eats too fast, resulting in an upset stomach. Shortly thereafter he returns to a familiar dirty café and he continues to feel ill.
Here are few more direct quotes on what Wallas sees in this city:
• “Mouth open, the man is staring into space, one elbow on the table propping up his bloated head.”
• “Once again, Wallas is walking toward the bridge. Ahead of him, under a snowy sky, extends the Rue de Brabant – and its grim housefronts.”
• “From another angle, the man assumes an almost coarse expression that has something vulgar, self-satisfied, rather repugnant about it.”
True, Wallas encounters one saleswoman who is upbeat and slightly provocative, but the other people he encounters, to the extent these men and woman are described, are drab and shabby and decidedly unattractive.
An entire city of unsightly sights and repellent people. Is it too much of a stretch to interpret the pistol Wallas shoots at the end of the novel as, in part, a reaction to overbearing ugliness? Perhaps in the same way the pistol shots in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (a work Alain Robbe-Grillet counts as one of his prime influences) are a reaction to the searing heat and glare from the sun and the young Arab’s knife blade?
Rather than providing a definitive answer, this raises another set of questions: Are we as readers so coarse and dull and deadened by the modern mechanized world that we accept the ugly as the norm? Does this acceptance account for the fact that all the essays and reviews I have read on this novel do not draw attention to the ugliness Wallas confronts?
― Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Erasers is one of the most convoluted, complex, knotty novels a reader could possibly encounter, a novel that can be approached from multiple perspectives and on multiple levels, everything from an intricate detective mystery to a meditation on the circularity of time, from the phenomenology of perception to the story of Oedipus.
For the purpose of this review, I will focus on one aspect of The Erasers I have not come across in any of the commentary I’ve read by scholars, literary critics or book reviewers – the prevalence of ugliness in the city where the novel is set.
With its winding streets and system of canals, the novel’s city has been likened to Amsterdam, but any likeness to this beautiful, charming Dutch city ends there. The cold Northern European industrial city we encounter in The Erasers is ugly and creepy, lacking any trace of charm or warmth.
The main character, special agent Wallas, who travels to the city to solve a murder, repeatedly reflects on this lack of aesthetic attraction and beauty, as when we read: “a city completely barren of appeal for an art lover," and then again, “a huge stone building ornamented with scrolls and scallops, fortunately few in number – in short, of rather somber ugliness.” From Wallas’s multiple observations, this unnamed city’s stark ugliness can bring to my mind Golconda by the surrealist René Magritte, a painting of a cityscape raining men in black suits and bowlers, painted in the same year as the publication of The Erasers.
This unattractiveness also extends to the people inhabiting the city. Two men described in some detail are both fat and flabby and move in a stiff and mechanical way: first, the manager of the café, portrayed as follows: “A fat man is standing here, the manager . . . greenish, his features blurred, liverish, and fleshy in his aquarium.” Second, Laurent, the chief commissioner: “He is a short, plump man with a pink face and a bald skull . . . his overfed body shakes from fits of laughter.”
Tom, one of the condemned prisoners, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s story The Wall is such a flabby, fat man. Also, Antoine Roquentin, the main character in Sartre’s novel Nausea, describes the shaking hands of another fat man: “Then there was his hand like a fat white worm in my own hand. I dropped it almost immediately and the arm fell back flabbily.”
So, why am I highlighting these facts? Because I have the strong impression both Robbe-Grillet and Sartre (a great influence on the author) saw flab and fat as repulsive and ugly, a counter to the possibility of freedom and spontaneity and fluidity we can experience in our human embodiment.
In contradistinction, Wallas is a tall, calm young man with regular features and who walks with an elastic, confident gate. But at every turn Wallas encounters ugliness, even in an automat where there is a sign reading: “Please Hurry. Thank you.” And this sign is repeated many times on the white walls of the automat. How nauseating! Not surprisingly, Wallas eats too fast, resulting in an upset stomach. Shortly thereafter he returns to a familiar dirty café and he continues to feel ill.
Here are few more direct quotes on what Wallas sees in this city:
• “Mouth open, the man is staring into space, one elbow on the table propping up his bloated head.”
• “Once again, Wallas is walking toward the bridge. Ahead of him, under a snowy sky, extends the Rue de Brabant – and its grim housefronts.”
• “From another angle, the man assumes an almost coarse expression that has something vulgar, self-satisfied, rather repugnant about it.”
True, Wallas encounters one saleswoman who is upbeat and slightly provocative, but the other people he encounters, to the extent these men and woman are described, are drab and shabby and decidedly unattractive.
An entire city of unsightly sights and repellent people. Is it too much of a stretch to interpret the pistol Wallas shoots at the end of the novel as, in part, a reaction to overbearing ugliness? Perhaps in the same way the pistol shots in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (a work Alain Robbe-Grillet counts as one of his prime influences) are a reaction to the searing heat and glare from the sun and the young Arab’s knife blade?
Rather than providing a definitive answer, this raises another set of questions: Are we as readers so coarse and dull and deadened by the modern mechanized world that we accept the ugly as the norm? Does this acceptance account for the fact that all the essays and reviews I have read on this novel do not draw attention to the ugliness Wallas confronts?
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