Notes On A Conversation With Eli And Virginia
Intent: This is a re-presentation of a conversation in which I attempt to reach a way of writing about the distortion of time and space in Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth and Last Year at Marienbad (with some help from Lacan and Žižek).
How to talk about a novel and film within the same dialogue?
Eli uses the word “re-presentation” as noun for paintings, films, and novels. Allowing him to speak of all types of objects and get at the “thing” behind them. I disagree in this word choice. I will use re-presentation to discuss the repetition in Last Year at Marienbad and In the Labyrinth.
Matt: So, I want to discuss the thing happening within these two works but recognize the inherent dialectic between them, regardless of the potentially minute size of that dialectic.
Virginia: So talk about that!
Eli: It’s ok to say “it’s” structuring in this way but say how it is structuring in this way.
The “how” is repetition and re-presentation. Talk about it (the event as presented) is a mediated event in itself. (Eli suggests: rooting my language of time in Chronoschism by Heise. Time is re-presented as doing such in This and is therefore doing THIS.)
Eli..Matt: The temporal structure of the postmodern work…infinite loop…rendered in this way because it is already existing in such a way. Like Lacan’s time-paradox of the symptom, initially appearing as a trace. Analysis is the symbolic integration of meaningless imaginary traces. The repressed returns from the future with the symptom’s meanings constructed retroactively. Only through the detouring of time does the objective state of things become retroactively what it always was (as in time-travel).
Eli: Spatiality and temporality as being culturally constructed and this being critiqued in Robbe-Grillet. You don’t have to say what the critique is, just how he’s doing it (re-presentations, the reality effect of Last Year at Marienbad and In the Labyrinth.
Virginia/Eli: You’re approaching the nature of narrative in different contexts through two works by Robbe-Grillet.
Matt: But it’s a closed, looped space as means for addressing psychological temporality. A closed loop forces continual movement through the same time and space and yet it is never the same space in time. How can the works be in dialectic and part of the same loop?
Eli: What you should do is write a preface on the differences between writing about novels and writing about films. What are the differences and what are the overlaps. Then you can address each one within the same structure, by creating your own structure.
Wrapping up:
The experience of reading In the Labyrinth and watching Last Year at Marienbad are so close to the same experience and yet Not. These things are like the infinite loop of Main Street in Pleasantville. They exist with similar structures (re-presentation) yet use different elements in construction of that structure: sentences in one and pictures in the other. Operating in the same manner by presenting themselves in slightly altering states over a small period of time (a few days).
The content reflects the way the narrative is rendered. These structural elements reflect the structures in the story its self. What makes Labyrinth and Marienbad so captivating to behold is that their narrative structure is the only way in which to render the structures inherent to the stories told.
[The story of a soldier wandering a vacant city and a lover attempting to conquer the apparent amnesia of his former lover are perfectly placed for narration through a loop of time and space.]
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Brooks, Virginia. Kalamazoo: Edwin Brooks and Holly Lovelace, 1989. Person.
Heise, Ursula K. “Chronoschisms.” Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. 3rd Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 361-386. Print
Last Year at Marienbad. Dir. Alain Resnais. Perf. Delphine Seyrig, Girorgio Albertazzi, and Sacha Pitoëff. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.
Mellen, Eli. Washington, D.C.: Mitchell Mellen and Lisa Karen Steinberg, 1989. Person.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Two Novels: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Brooklyn: Verso, 1989. Print.
