Antonioni lets his forms express the alienation he wants to communicate to his public. By choosing to express it in the very structure of his discourse, he manages to control it while letting it act upon his viewers. This movie about a useless and unlikely love affair between useless and unlikely characters tells us more about contemporary man and his world than a panoramic melodrama involving workers in overalls and countless social confrontations, structured according to the logical, rational demands of a nineteenthcentury plot—whose very denouement would imply the resolution of all contradictions into a universal order.’3 In fact, the only order man can impose upon his situation is the order of a structural organization whose very disorder leads to the apprehension of the situation.
Naturally, the artist does not provide a solution. As Zolla points out, thought must understand. Its task is not to provide remedies. At least, not yet.
All this should, of course, lend a clearer meaning to the function of the avantgarde and of its descriptive possibilities. To understand the world, avantgarde art delves into it and assumes its critical condition from within, adopting, to describe it, the same alienated language in which it expresses itself. But by giving this language a descriptive function and laying it bare as a narrative form, avantgarde art also strips it of its alienating aspects and allows us to demystify it.
Another pedagogical function of this poetics could be the following: the new perception of things, and the new way of relating them to each other, promoted by art might eventually lead us to understand our situation not by imposing on it a univocal order expressive of an obsolete conception of the world but rather by elaborating models leading to a number of mutually complementary results, as science does. In this way, even those artistic processes that seem most removed from our immediate concerns may in fact provide us with the imaginative categories necessary to move more easily in this world.
Having reached this conclusion, however, can we assert with any degree of certainty that this process, whose first phase involves the acceptance of the existing situation and our immersion in it in order to possess it from within, will not end in a total objectification of the situation and a passive adherence to the «continuous flux of existence»? Calvino raised this very issue a few years ago when he denounced the disquieting and suffocating presence of a «sea of objectivity.» Indeed, there is a great deal of literature that could end up as a mere recording of inaction, as a nearly photographic reproduction of dissociation, as a beatific vision (in Zenlike terms) of what happens.
But, as I have already noted, it is impossible to stand up to the «flux of existence» by opposing it to an ideal human standard of measurement.
What results is not an irrational, obtuse, metaphysical datum: it is the world of modified nature, of manmade work. We now see this manmade world as if it existed independently of our labor, as if it had evolved according to its own laws. This world that we have created can now turn us into its tools, but it can also provide us with the elements necessary to establish the parameters for a new human standard of measurement. The flux of existence would remain essentially unaltered and hostile to us if we lived in its midst without speaking of it.
But as soon as we start speaking of it, be it only to record its distortions, we judge it, we alienate ourselves to it, and thus we take the first step toward repossessing it. To speak, however objectively, of a «sea of objectivity» means that we have already reduced this objectivity to a human dimension.
But this is not the way Calvino sees it. Quite the contrary. He seems to take for granted what RobbeGrillet says when he theorizes on his work. In his ambiguously (I would even say «falsely») phenomenological poetics, RobbeGrillet pretends that his narrative technique aims at an uncommitted vision of things, at an acceptance of things for what they are, beside and beyond us: «The world is neither significant nor absurd.
It is, quite simply .. . Around us, defying the noisy pack of our animistic or protective adjectives, things are there. Their surfaces are distinct and smooth, intact, neither suspiciously brilliant nor transparent. All our literature has not yet succeeded in eroding their smallest corner, in flattening their slightest curve . . . Let it be first of all by their presence that objects and gestures establish themselves, and let this presence continue to prevail over whatever explanatory theory that may try to enclose them in a system of references, whether emotional, sociological, Freudian or metaphysical.»»
This sort of statement amply justifies Calvino’s alarm. But it would be wrong to give it more credit than it deserves. What an artist tells us explicitly is often contradicted by what he tells us implicitly, in the way he has constructed his work. A work of art, taken as the successful expression of a way of forming, can refer to the formal tendencies of an entire culture or an entire period, tendencies which, in turn, reflect analogous procedures in other fields, such as science and philosophy.
The idea of such a Kunstwollen seems particularly suited to a discourse concerning the cultural meaning of contemporary formal tendencies. And yet, there is quite a discrepancy between what RobbeGrillet says he is doing in his work and what he in fact does. In his books, things do not appear as extraneous metaphysical entities, totally unrelated to us; rather, they appear to have a very particular relationship with us, to be «intentioned» by us. They are assumed and judged, and therefore reduced to a human dimension. RobbeGrillet’s work deals both with objects and with the people who see them and who can no longer relate to them, though they might yet find a new way of doing so in the future.
The fluidity of characterization in In the Labyrinth—where objects also appear as fluid—is, in fact, only an expression of a new vision of time and reversibility, such as has emerged from the hypotheses of modern science. (As I have mentioned elsewhere, the temporal structure of In the Labyrinth had already been sketched by Hans Reichenbachr Although, at the level of macroscopic relationships, the only applicable notion of time remains that of classical physics as it is reflected in the structures of traditional narrative—and, more specifically, in the irreversible and univocal relationship between cause and effect the artist can decide to make an experiment that has absolutely no scientific validity but is characteristic of the way in which an entire culture reacts to new stimuli; he can thus structure his narrative according to a nonclassical notion of time.
At this point, such a notion of time is no longer a scientific model used to describe remote microphysical events; rather, it becomes a sort of game that we play from inside and that gives shape to our entire existence.
This is only one possible interpretation of In the Labyrinth, and yet the labyrinth could also be used as an apt metaphor for the stock market situation described by Antonioni in Eclipse—a place in which people are constantly becoming other than themselves, in which they find it impossible to follow the progress of their investments and to interpret events according to a unidirectional chain of cause and effect.
Of course, I am not saying that RobbeGrillet meant to do all this in his book. He did not have to. All he had to do was create a structural situation that would lend itself to all sorts of personal interpretations without, for all that, losing any of its basic ambiguity: «As for the novel’s characters, they may themselves suggest many possible interpretations; they may, according to the preoccupations of each reader, accommodate all kinds of comment—psychological, psychiatric, religious, or political—yet their indifference to these ‘potentialities’ will soon be apparent . . . The future hero will remain, on the contrary, there. It is the commentaries that will be left elsewhere; in the face of his irrefutable presence, they will seem useless, superfluous, even improper.» ‘6
Robbe-Grillet is right in thinking that a narrative structure must remain below all the interpretations it may elicit, but he is wrong in thinking that it can entirely avoid them because it is extraneous to them. It can’t be extraneous to them, since it is a sort of propositional function which can stand for a series of situations that are already familiar to us.
It is a propositional function that each of us fills in a different way depending on how we look at it, but that is there to be filled since it is the field of possibilities of a series of relationships that can really be posited—just as the constellation of sounds that constitutes a musical series is the field of possibilities of the series of relationships we can establish among these sounds. Narrative structures have become fields of possibilities precisely because, when we enter a contradictory situation in order to understand it, the tendencies of such a situation can no longer assume a unilinear development that can be determined a priori.
Rather, all of them appear to us as equally possible, some in a positive fashion and some in a negative, some as a way out of the situation and others
