Two Novels: Jealousy and in the Labyrinth by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Author:Alain Robbe-Grillet
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780802151063
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1960-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The picture, in its varnished wood frame, represents a tavern scene. It is a nineteenth-century etching, or a good reproduction of one. A large number of people fill the room, a crowd of drinkers sitting or standing, and, on the far left, the bartender standing on a slightly raised platform behind his bar.

The bartender is a fat, bald man wearing an apron. He leans forward, both hands resting on the edge of the bar, over several half-full glasses that have been set there, his massive shoulders turned toward a small group of middle-class citizens in frock coats who appear to be engaged in an animated discussion; standing in various attitudes, many are making expansive gestures that sometimes involve the whole body, and are doubtless quite expressive.

To their right, that is, in the center of the scene, several groups of drinkers are sitting at tables that are irregularly arranged—or rather, crammed—in a space too small to hold them all comfortably. These men are also making extravagant gestures and their faces are violently contorted, but their movements, like their expressions, are frozen by the drawing, suspended, stopped short, which also makes their meaning uncertain; particularly since the words being shouted on all sides seem to have been absorbed by a thick layer of glass. Some of them, carried away by their excitement, have half risen from their chairs or their benches and are pointing over the heads of the others toward a more distant interlocutor. Everywhere hands rise, mouths open, heads turn; fists are clenched, pounded on tables, or brandished in mid-air.

At the far right a group of men, almost all workers judging from their clothes, like those sitting at the tables, have their backs to the latter and are crowding around some poster or picture tacked on the wall. A little in front of them, between their backs and the first row of drinkers facing in the other direction, a boy is sitting on the floor among all these legs with their shapeless trousers, all these clumsy boots stamping about and trying to move toward his left; on the other side he is partially protected by the bench. The child is shown facing straight ahead. He is sitting with his legs folded under him, his arms clasped around a large box something like a shoe box. No one is paying any attention to him. Perhaps he was knocked down in the confusion. As a matter of fact, in the foreground, not far from where he is sitting, a chair has been overturned and is still lying on the floor.

Somewhat apart, as though separated from the crowd surrounding them by an unoccupied zone—narrow, of course, but nevertheless wide enough for their isolation to be noticeable, in any case wide enough to call attention to them though they are in the background—three soldiers are sitting around a smaller table, the second from the rear on the right, their motionlessness and. rigidity in marked contrast to the civilians who fill the room. The soldiers

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