The Novels of Kim Young-ha
Graphs, Maps, Trees
I see little reason to take most of what passes for literary criticism in Salon seriously, much less to refute it 2 years after the fact, but if it ends up getting Dan Green to dissect The Voyeur, then I’ll say that Salon has done some good.
Like its immediate predecessor The Erasers, The Voyeur is essentially a detective story, although the earlier novel (Robbe-Grillet’s first) literally includes a detective in its cast of characters while The Voyeur asks the reader to do the detective work its story calls for. It includes a murder of a young girl and a possibly psychopathic killer, both of them elements that would seemingly be attractive to the “popular” readers Marche believes Robbe-Grillet spurned and as far from the assumptions of “high art” as one could get. What is missing from its mystery plot is a firm resolution of the mystery, and while this refusal to accede to the conventions of the genre might be frustrating to some readers, it also manifests a commitment to the depiction of life’s complexities, which are not reducible to the neat resolutions of mystery stories. This commitment is not a characteristic of “high art.” It is a characteristic of art.
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Dan Green provides salient, spot-on comments about The Voyeur. It’s probably the best book for anyone to start with who is curious about Robbe-Grillet but unfamiliar with him. As far as reaching a wide audience, Robbe-Grillet said someplace that he was less interested in having best sellers than long sellers, which he has in fact achieved. All his work is still in print in French, as well as a good bit of what has been put into English (most of it, as a matter of fact, with the curious exceptions of the last two volumes of his “autofictions”).