Deja Viewmaster

Imagine slipping from a train for a quick breath of carcinogenic air, then jumping back aboard, returning to your compartment and finding yourself standing before you.

That's right: You - right before your very own eyes.

Now: What do you do?

RepetitionWell if you're anything at all like the first of what could be two Henri Robins in Alain Robbe-Grillet's high-low French face-off - Repetition (Grove Press $23) - you grab your dispatch case from the baggage net and start running. Fast.

But you don't let the shake-up stop you from following your "large, convex nose" wherever it goes - no matter how fishy things get.

Henri Robin, aka Boris Wallon, aka Franck Mathieu, soon-to-be called "Wall," is a flaky French special agent lured to a bombed-out, post-War Berlin to either stop, witness, participate-in, cover-up, or carry-out an assassination. He's never told which and - strangely, suitably (this is Robbe-Grillet) - he never thinks to ask. The lurer, one Pierre Garin, an occasional co-operative with a minimum of revelations and a modicum of assumption, isn't telling either.

So sets the austere stage of Repetition. That HR's rather Strangers On The Train episode is swiftly followed by a hesitant going to where Kierkegaard had twice gone before, would suggest we're in for a kinda mystery-based existentialism. The matter-of-fact probing and Chandleresque wordslinging would confirm it - to a slow, hard boil. However, as the names - and, in turn, the identities - begin to pile-up and crowd the mind, only to abruptly leave (everyone hanging), existence seems only symbolic.

But as the man says: "Nothing is more enigmatic than an allegory."

From Kierkegaard's former perch on #57, Jagerstrasse ("The Street of the Hunter"), our Maxwell not-so-Smart cops a spy's-eye-view of the promised killing. Or does he? A trained observer, he thinks he knows what he sees. A snoop, he descends through the dark for evidence to support his witness. Weary from the watch, though, he then takes a nap. Bad move. For of course it's when he awakes that the proverbial nightmare begins.

Fur-clad and already half-mad, HR stumbles from his now evidence-less lair down Deja-vu lane and into a twin-helmed hotel where his room remains just as he left it. One problem: he's never been there before. But the Brothers Mahler - and the pretty young maid - are so insistent, it must be true. So be it. Now known, even to himself, as "Wall," he hits the bricks in search of another thread to choke on. He finds it - and more - amid dolls and darkness and an "unreal legion of barely nubile flower maidens in the power of the Arthuro-Wagnerian wizard Klingsor." There, the Madam den mother - Joelle Kast - seduces him; but it is to the harpie Gigi that he is truly smitten.

Poor, poor pitiful Henri. Torn between two succubi.

Jo Kast may - as reported - be a reference to Oedipus' mother Jocasta, but with all the metamorphosing goin' on, she could just as well be a sideways nod to Kafka's Josef K. This is where identities are lost, stolen, and transferred, yet seldom ever found. As for the bewitching Jo K, well, she's no match for the peachy, creamy Gigi, who with her pout and her lies and her abbreviated school girl uniform, really drives our dumbfounded hero's dreamscape. That Gigi detours to a basement equivalent of Octave Mirbeau's Torture Garden only makes the descent that much more stirring.

First shaken, then stirred, HR's now further clouded by a series of ever-concealing illuminations. Seductions and temptations beget escapes and wanderings, wonderings, and prescience, "incest, twinship, and blindness." His trek - mentally and physically - becomes "a struggle in the midst of doublings, ineffable apparitions, recurrent images in reiterating mirrors," as he's propelled through "a succession of episodes which seem to have no other connection than contiquity."

Oh, to know uncertain end.

This being Robbe-Grillet, Repetition is heady stuff; he being French, it's a sexy cerebralism. And yes, it's trippy. The void that fills "the hole in ordinary space," a kinda Twilight Zone by way of Eric Rohmer. I woulda luv'd to have seen more of Gigi's workplace, the Sphinx (house proverb: "whores and crooks always arrive sooner than priests!"), and its Allied-attendant "third-rate spies, pimps, psychoanalysts, avant-garde architects, war criminals, [and] shady businessman with their lawyers" - "everyone you need to start the world over." But that's just me.

But don't think for a minute there's any lack of either shade or shadow. Robbe-Grillet's assembled a deliciously duplicitous cast - where everyone is suspect, anyone is culpable, and all end-up to no good. Or do they?

It's been a full half-century since Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers stripped the novel of all its artifice. In that 50 years fiction's been structuralized, semiotized, deconstructed and recontextualized ad nauseam, through PoMo, Hyper, and Meta, among sundry other transgressions. And still " the old words always already spoken repeat themselves, always telling the same old story from age to age, repeated once again and always new." In Repetition - a slender yet never slight work - Robbe-Grillet, the Grandfather of the New Novel, seems to be saying that we cannot escape ourselves. We are what we breathe, think, feel write. Deal with it. To some the New Novel may be old hat, but style - and story - remains eternal.

Delirium, dementia, disturbance - they're all in Repetition. Robbe-Grillet's nothing if not a master of deja-viewing Reich's "mind at the end of its tether." If memory serves - as we believe it does - the mere fact that it's a subordinate faculty makes it suspect. It serves - whim, ego, prejudice, and the myriad agendas that make-up ourselves. Can we remember what will happen? That's for us to figure out/decide.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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