Reading Unruly by Zalloua Zahi

Author:Zalloua, Zahi [Zahi Zalloua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780803246270
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska Paperback
Published: 2014-03-05T21:46:14+00:00

— is symptomatic of his uneasiness and loss of footing in the changing field of power. “Looking and being looked at . . . places jealousy at the center of the plantation problem, which is a microcosm of the colonial problem,” Leenhardt concludes.11 For Leenhardt, neither Jealousy’s textual self-reflexivity nor its psychological realism should blind the reader to the novel’s historical frame of reference or its ideological content. Accordingly, Jealousy’s realism, its epistemological claims about the referential world, lie not so much in the evocation of the narrator’s psychic reality but in the novel’s representation of a colonial mentality, or more precisely, in its staging of the ideological tension inherent in the devolution and devaluation of Western colonialism.

Already in 1959, however, literary critic and novelist Maurice Blanchot was warning against any referential reading of the novel, that is, a reading in which the primary goal is to explicate and domesticate Robbe-Grillet’s unruly narration by imposing a hermeneutic order, a reading whose attempt at comprehensive mastery raises both aesthetic and ethical questions. In The Book to Come, Blanchot not only questions the primacy of the husband’s jealousy but also problematizes the very existence of such a central character. Taking objection, in particular, to the jacket blurb’s characterization of the narrator as a jealous husband,12 Blanchot underscores the novel’s radical alterity, its irreducibility to a thematic analysis, and its departure from preexisting literary models. More importantly, noting the “powerful absence [at] the center of the plot and of the narration,” he reminds the reader that no character is ever in fact named as the narrator and that what we have instead is an absent I:

According to the critics, we are to understand that what is speaking in this absence is the very character of the jealous one, the husband who watches over his wife. I think this misunderstands the authentic reality of this narrative as the reader is invited to approach it. The reader indeed feels that something is missing; he has the premonition that it is this lack that allows everything to be said and everything to be seen — but how could this lack be identified with someone? How could there still be a name and an identity there? It is nameless, faceless; it is pure anonymous presence.13

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