Example: La Maison de Rendez-vous

Throughout this chapter, I return to a particular example of impossible fiction: Robbe- Grillet’s La Maison de Rendez-vous. This section gives an overview of Maison’s plot and impossible elements. These are, respectively, convoluted and myriad. The novella regularly contradicts itself, shifts between scenes and moves from the main story to a story-within-a- story without any warning. I highlight the difficulty that a typical reader has in intuitively understanding and in normalising Maison. I also point out that this difficulty does not necessarily prevent a typical reader from enjoying the novella. In fact, the typical reader’s inability to intuitively grasp the fiction can play a significant role in her enjoyment of the fiction.

Maison is about a murder which occurs during a Hong Kong aristocrat’s party. The

novella is written so that events make sense at the point they occur, but they are rendered impossible by things which happen earlier or later in the novel. For example, a dog is at once stuffed and still alive in the following:

[A mannequin bends her elbow] in order to control a big black dog with shiny fur walking in front of her.

The animal has been mounted with great skill. And were it not for its total immobility, its slightly overemphasised stiffness… one would think it was about to complete its interrupted movement… Strolling in front of the shop-window, the girl in the black sheath… continues walking with the same even gait past the buildings, holding on its taut leash the big dog with the shiny fur whose half-open mouth drools a little, then closes with a dry snap (Robbe-Grillet 1987: 133–135).

Each time the dog is mentioned, its features make sense. In the first instance, it is incredibly lifelike, but inanimate. In the second, it is alive enough to drool and close its mouth. However, when juxtaposed these two descriptions are inconsistent. Robbe-Grillet’s use of the definite description ‘the’ heavily implies that the living dog and the stuffed dog are the same animal. This means that this dog is both alive and dead—an absolute impossibility. This is far from the only contradiction in the novel. William Ashline identifies another: Edouard Mannaret, the victim of the novel’s murder plot, is killed but manages to speak to one character on the telephone and another in person after his death (Ashline 1995: 2). Just like the dog, Mannaret is alive in some scenes and dead in others, with no regard for continuity. Robbe-Grillet specialist Bruce Morrissette describes the process:

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Johnson is pursued by the police because he has killed Mannaret, the money-lender; when he manages to evade the officers, Johnson… proceeds to the scene of the crime, but there “actually” kills Mannaret, and in the fashion already described by the police. This time there is no… solution, and, in fact, Mannaret (or his double, or triple) will die several times, and at various hands (Morrissette 1966: 822).

The story of Maison is full of temporal shifts. Johnson’s pursuit isn’t merely presented as occurring before he murders Mannaret; the murder actually does occur after the pursuit. These inconsistencies make Maison an impossible fiction. As the previous chapter claims, this means that readers will, under typical circumstances, attempt to normalise the fiction.

Maison is interesting, however, because normalising it poses a challenge.

Some readers are well-equipped to normalise Maison according to the generic or genetic principles discussed in the last chapter (pp. 87-90). These well-informed readers are aware of Robbe-Grillet’s techniques, his preoccupation with the experimental nouveau

roman, and of the stylisations of postmodern French literature. The frequent non-sequiturs

and deviations contained in Maison can be correctly attributed to these genre quirks, or to Robbe-Grillet’s idiosyncratic approach of reinventing his style and subject with each work of fiction. Normalising Maison does not pose a significant challenge to these readers. However, while such readers represent a proportion of Maison’s readership, they do not exhaust it.

Not every reader is aware of the relevant genre conventions or biographical history, and consequently is unable to use them to normalise Maison. Not only this, but the convoluted impossibilities of the story are so extensive that the reader may have difficulty using alternative principles of normalisation. In particular, the perspectival principle seems poorly placed to help normalise the fiction: the aforementioned fluctuations in time make it difficult to see how the narrator could mislead the reader in any minor way. Instead, adopting the perspectival principle would involve rejecting almost all of the narrative, and claiming that most of the narration bears almost no resemblance to what should be taken as occurring in the story.

As a result of this inconsistency and irrationality, Maison undermines the standard methods readers use to engage with impossible fictions. Under typical circumstances, a reader has an easy, natural understanding of a fiction. This allows the reader to make complex inferences and predictions while forming her impressions. This includes low-level information, such as causation (Anna Karenina’s failed relationship with Vronsky was the reason for her suicide) and simple counterfactuals (if no train had been approaching, Anna would not have died when she threw herself on the tracks). In some cases, this also includes

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more sophisticated processes. Such processes might include positing narrative unreliability, complex counterfactuals (If Anna and Vronsky had made any friends in Italy, their relationship would have been successful) and the ability to imagine the events of the fiction in close detail. These abilities are present in many impossible fictions as well.38 _{In the case}

of Maison, however, these abilities are absent. The repeated contradictions and temporal inconsistencies make it difficult to follow the plot or understand the characters’ motivations. The reader’s impressions are constantly undermined by the unannounced changes in the narrative.

As a shorthand for this ability to intuitively comprehend a fiction, I follow Stephen Yablo in using the term ‘grokking’ (Yablo 2002: 485). To grok a concept is to understand it comfortably, intuitively and profoundly. The act of is what makes a difficult fiction grokkable to a reader. This is why very little normalisation is required for standard, possible fictions, but a great deal of normalisation is required for certain impossible fictions. While the competent reader of Anna Karenina is able to grok what she reads with little effort, the reader of Maison is not. Due to its inconsistencies and contradictions, the reader of Maison cannot, for example, make predictions or detailed inferences about the story. The information on which she bases her inferences is subject to revision and erasure by the shifting narrative. Inability to grok a fiction does not indicate a total lack of understanding; the reader is still able to form some kind of impression of the fiction. However, this impression will be sparse and uncertain. This means that the kind of imaginative engagement the reader has with Maison is qualitatively different to her easy, natural engagement with a fiction like Anna Karenina.

The inability to grok Maison can prevent the reader from enjoying the experience of reading the fiction in much the same way that it is difficult to enjoy a play performed in an unfamiliar language, or which one has only joined halfway through. However, it may also offer a unique kind of experience. Disliking Maison is not the only reasonable or even likely response to this challenging fiction. The novella has many positive reviews. Critical reviews describe Maison as ‘poetic, amusing, captivating’ (‘La Maison de Rendez-vous & Djinn', n.d.). User reviews on Goodreads are widely positive (‘La Maison de Rendez-vous’, n.d.). These people all report enjoying Maison. I claim that this enjoyment is not in spite of the contradictions in the text. Instead, I argue that these contradictions are themselves a source

38 _{Priest assumes this in his brief questionnaire in ‘Sylvan’s Box: A Short Story and Ten Morals’,}

arguing that readers will not infer that the box was shot into space at the end of the fiction (1997: 579).

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To make this argument, I draw on work concerning the appreciation of fictions which challenge readers in this way. My primary source is Umberto Eco, who writes on the pleasures of impossible fiction in his 1990 The Limits of Interpretation. Eco claims that impossible fictions ‘self-disclose’—highlight their own fictional nature (1994: 77). According to Eco, this self-disclosure means that there are two general experiences of the impossible fiction: one naive reading, where the reader is confused and disarmed by the fiction’s impossible elements, and a higher-level reading where the reader appreciates the narrative techniques which brought about the naive reading. The following section provides the groundwork needed to properly understand Eco’s claim.