l'homme qui ment

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Robbe-Grillet's L'Homme qui ment: The Lie Belied

Author(s): Carol J. MurphyReviewed work(s):Source: The French Review, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Oct., 1983), pp. 37-42Published by: American Association of Teachers of FrenchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/391062 .

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THE FRENCHREVIEW,Vol. LVII, No. 1, October 1983 Printed in U.S.A.

Robbe-Grillet'sL'Hommequi ment:The LieBelied

byCarolJ.Murphy

IN HIS 1967 FILM, L'HOMMEQUIMENT, Alain Robbe-Grillet has succeeded intranslating to the screen the sleight-of-hand narrative techniques and themesof his novels that are both enhanced and rendered more elusive by the addedcomplexities of the visual and auditory components of the filmic medium.Although not his first film (the scenario for Resnais's L'Annee derniere aMarienbadwas written in 1961, L'Immortelleand Trans-EuropExpressdate from1963 and 1966 respectively), L'Hommequi ment shows a clear maturity of stylein Robbe-Grillet's development as a filmmaker. It received some critical recog-nition, even though not particularly favorable, because, as Robbe-Grillet hasmaintained, the public could not determine whether the man is lying or not.'The title of the film is ironic, however, and the thrust of the action "lies"inbelying the lie. Using techiques similar to those found in his novels, Robbe-Grillet sets up an opposition between truth and falsehood at several differentlevels in the film while simultaneously contesting the possibility of any resolu-tion of these two contraries. The resultant "truth"of the film is a new logic,what Gilles Deleuze refers to as a "logique du sens,"2based on the sustainingof contradictions and the continual production of meanings through glissementsor semantic swerves. The theme of resistance that colors the film is, in fact, aresistance to truth, to message, to ideology and to recuperation. This being said,I will try to "recuperate," n my brief analysis, the story line that is constantlybeing subverted in and by the film.

The adjective "Kafkaesque" s an appropriate attribute for the film, not onlybecause it was shot in Czechoslovakia (as a Franco-Czech co-production) butalso because the central protagonist, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, isreminiscent of K in The Castle. The film is situated in time several years afteran unidentified war. At the very beginning of the film, an unknown figurenamed Boris emerges from the forest at the edge of an unnamed easternEuropean village. Although this shadowy figure purports to be called BorisVarissa, he is not quite sure. He refers to himself sometimes as Boris andsometimes as Jean Robin, the village hero of the Resistance movement who hasmysteriously disappeared. Boris-Jeanis obsessed with telling his story to every-one in the village as well as to Jean's wife Laura, his sister Sylvia, the servant

Seminar at the University of Florida ("Nouveau Roman, Nouveau Cinema"), 31 March 1982.2 Gilles Deleuze, Logiquedu Sents Paris: Minuit, 1969).37

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Maria, and his father Frantz. The problem is that all of his stories contradictone another; first he is Boris, then he is Jean;Jean was a hero, or rather a traitor;Boris rescued Jean, but no, he handed him over to the enemy; Jean is alive, nodead; Boris dies, but is ressuscitated, etc. In typical Robbe-Grillet fashion, thefilm plunges the spectator into the perpetual beginnings of a possible story; weare lost in the muddle and mobility of an imaginative and imagining mindsimilar to that explored by Resnais in Providence,but without the reconstitutionof the story with which Resnais so kindly assuages us at the end of his film.Where lies the truth and what constitutes the lie in L'Hommequi ment?Robbe-Grillet's ruse is to tease the spectator into making this distinction; that is, heleads us to attempt to choose one or the other alternative (the lie or the truth)in several ways. Most obviously, the film's title suggests a differentiationbetween truth and falsehood, and this basic opposition is underlined by thestark black-and-white medium of the film, from which Robbe-Grillet scrupu-lously eliminated all shades of gray. The resultant texture prevents any sensationof depth-perception or even the possibility that the spectators lose themselvesin the gauzy effect of a dream world. In addition to the film's black-and-whitetonality, its visual and auditory components are constantly disjointed. Thesoundtrack, composed by Michel Fano, is an assembly of sound effects whichscores its own musical themes that are then played out in seemingly contrapun-tal fashion against the recurring themes on the image track; the result is asustained opposition-a counterpoint that buttresses the dualism hinted at bythe title and insinuated by the black-and-white contrasts of the film.In addition, sequences at the diegetic level of the film are played out induplicate and are series of oppositions between heroism and betrayal, rescueand condemnation, and by extension, true and false. For example, two rendi-tions of a scene that takes place in a pharmacy present two sides to an action:the heroic and the denunciatory. In the first version, Jean (an actual characterplayed by Jean Mistric) enters the pharmacy and asks for a bottle of mercuro-chrome; a soldier arrives and the pharmacienne, played by Catherine Robbe-Grillet, courageously agrees to hide Jean from the enemy troops by leading himthrough an underground passageway whose entry is concealed behind thecounter. In the second version, which occurs later in the film, Boris-Trintignantenters, makes the same request and is obliged to wait while the lady pharmacistmysteriously disappears. Jean emerges from a closet and again descends intothe cave, this time followed by Boris. A quick cut to the pharmacist in the streetreveals her denouncing Jean-Mistric to the same group of soldiers from whomshe had just sheltered him, and he is consequently pursued and shot. In thesevariant scenes, the spectator is thus burdened with conflicting possibilities ofinterpretation. Another sequence based on an alternation between rescue andbetrayal occurs when Boris-Trintignant attempts to extricate Jean-Mistric fromprison in a haycart. His success in the first sequence is contradicted by a secondversion in which Jean-Mistric denounces Boris to the prison guards. Theconfusion created by doubling at the diegetic level is also complicated bycharacter doubling, the most obvious example being, of course, the Boris-Jeanrapprochement.

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ROBBE-GRILLET'SL'HOMME QUI MENTIn short, by its proliferation of alternatives, L'Hommequi ment provokes adecision-making response on the part of the spectator who is constantlyprodded at many levels of the film to select one element over another and to

try to resolve the dilemma of the action. However, as in Robbe-Grillet's novelssuch as Les Gommes or Dans le labyrinthe,we, as detectives in search of a story,become victims of the crime and are lost in the labyrinth of multiple interpre-tations. The truth of the film lies elsewhere: its narrative and filmic structuresare based on the sustaining, rather than on the resolution, of contradictories.The fact that the film is a fiction which plunges us into a new logic ofsustained oppositions is accentuated by the opening sequence. Borrowing fromQueneau's parody of the Cartesian cogito in Le Chiendent (where he graduallyinsinuates his central character into existence by thinking him to exist), Boris isliterally being shot at and shot into existence by the soldiers who are, like thecamera, tracking him. Form and content are merged in this initial sequence.Using a dolly shot, Robbe-Grillet propels Trintignant from a forest (suggestiveof an Urwald or Freudian unconscious) into the film in a state of confusedidentity. The Boris-Jean doubling is suggested from the very first lines spokenin the film: "Myname is Jean Robin." "My name is Boris;others call me Jean.""Icome on Jean's behalf. My name is Boris. BorisVarissa."Although Jean-LouisTrintignant seems little by little to take on the stable identity of Boris as hewanders into the village tavern and through the family manor, the filmcontinually plays with our perceptions of the character's identity in a mannerthat constantly reminds us of the freedom of the filmic, and thus fictive,medium. For example, Boris is confused with Jean in several shots that mightbe called metafilmic. In one of these scenes, a shot of a picture of the hero JeanRobin (Jean Mistric) is followed by a cut to Jean-Louis Trintignant (as Boris) inthe same picture frame and alive. At other moments in the film both Boris-Trintignant and Jean Robin (Mistric) are framed by doorways and windows ina series of rapid cross-cuttings. The insistence on frames of interchangeablecharacters in frames is a visual statement about the fictitious and thus fluidaspect of their identities; at another semantic level (a figurative one whichworks only in English), the proliferation of frames is also suggestive of acontinual "framing"of the audience being led on to differentiate characters andstory line by the oppositions noted above. Andre Gardies has pointed out thismirroringeffect of story and filmic medium (image of images, photos of photosand frames of frames) as a device which sets up a game of expectation anddisappointment in the semantic network of the film. In Gardies' interpretation,Robbe-Grillet frees the frame from a stable semantic and referential system,that is, a single shot (plan) becomes a pure signifier (signifiant) freed of a stablesignified (signifie). This disjunction results in an emphasis on the hiatus or gapbetween two frames.3 Robbe-Grillet uses discontinuous frames (faux raccordsand jump cuts) to suggest the meshing of two characters into one. For example,there is a sequence in the film where Jean-Mistric leaps into the air, and thesucceeding shot captures Boris-Trintignant landing deftly on his feet from the

3Andre Gardies, 'Recit et Materiau Filmique,' in Robbe-Grillet:Analyse,Theorie,v. 2. Cinenma/Roman(Paris:UGE 10/18, 1976), p. 98.

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same mid-air position occupied by Jean a 24th-of-a-second before. Teasing hisspectator, Robbe-Grillet simultaneously transgresses the principle of continuityor match (raccord)and invites a comparison of the two characters through theirgestures. In a sense, he has rendered filmically what Beckett has done in hisnovel Molloy where two supposedly separate characters Moran and Molloybecome confused and are suggested to be a composite character in the similar-ities of their behavior and quest.The technique of opposition/confusion is quite evident in the film's sound-track where contrapuntal patterns of sounds and images are established andexpectations are created by the recurrence of certain sounds. For example, thesound of heavy boots signals the presence of the father, the machinegun fire isquite naturally associated with war and, as Robbe-Grillet has interpreted it, thesound of the woodpecker signals the mendacious chatter of "the man wholies."4However, a look at a few sound-image contrasts reveals a lack of strictpatterning and steady counterpoint in the musical score. In his sound-track,Michel Fano has produced a musical version of Robbe-Grillet's verbal andvisual play in his novels and films. For Fano, segments of meaning in Robbe-Grillet's works are related to one another in a state of interference, that is, theyintersect and contradict one another.5 Like the jump cut of Boris-Jeanaccom-plishing the same gesture in different spaces, the musical score by Fano stressesopposition and association, disjunction and continuity. Working with distinct,isolated sounds and absolute silences, Fano sets up a rhythmic pattern (e.g., thevolley of shots which opens the film and signifies war and the pursuit of Boris-Trintignant), then subverts it (e.g., the same sounds of shots interrupt a peacefulscene later on in the film where they signify nothing in direct relation to thevisual, except perhaps the overriding menace of the war and the pursuit ofBoris and Jean). These sounds (of dialogue, of ambiance, of isolated noises) are,like the individual frames, freed of a direct referential function and are playedoff both against the images and against one another. For example, a look at theseries organized around the frame of a glass breaking will reveal severaldifferent orchestrations. The sequence is introduced by the sound of a shotshattering the glass. We both see and hear the glass breaking in the normalcausal pattern. The second time that the sound of a glass breaking is heard,there is an immediate cut to the barmaid with an unbroken glass in her hand.On the image track, she then breaks it, but we do not hear the shattering as wesee it happening. Later in the film, we hear the familiar sound but see no glass.Finally we see a glass breaking and we hear the sound a few seconds afterward.Obviously, the lack of synchronization is geared to direct our attention todisjunction and discontinuity that, in turn, become the basis of a new patternof order (as disorder) in the film. Another example of sound-image disjunctionoccurs while Borisis walking through the countryside. The eerily silent sequenceis only occasionally punctuated by a hollow echoing of clanging metal. The

4 Seminar, University of Florida, 31 March 1982.5 Michel Fano, "L'Ordremusical chez Alain Robbe-Grillet: le discours sonore dans ses films," inRobbe-Grillet:Analyse, Theorie, v. I Roman/Cinema, p. 177.

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ROBBE-GRILLET'SL'HOMME QUI MENTvisual suggestion of tranquillity and calm is interrupted by a menacing soundsuggesting the tracking of the character in the opening sequence. At othermoments bells ring and we see no bell, or we see a bell and hear the sound ofa woodpecker, etc. Examples of sound-image discontinuity are legion, butattempts to codify or contain them are constantly defied.Sounds are also at odds with sounds. For example, Boris' monologue at thebeginning of the film informs us that when he arrived at the village pub (havingescaped the soldiers in the field), it was empty. At the same time, a frame ofthe pub reveals that it is filled with animated drinkers and the soundtrackregisters silence. Later, while Boris is outside talking to the old women of thevillage, the sounds of an animated pub usurp what should be his conversationswith the women. What Fano has accomplished is to orchestrate all the normaldialogue and sound effects to accompany the multiple stories that are beingsuggested visually but to dislocate them causally, temporally and spatially fromthe images. At one moment in the film, the soundtrack is used in a metanarra-tional manner to comment on the spectacle that we are witnessing. Boris-Trintignant is discovered in bed with Sylvia by the stern authoritarian father-figure Frantz. Stating once more his desire to tell the "true"story, Boris exitsfrom the bedroom to sounds of the clapping of a wildly-enthusiastic audience.By the association of a commonly-heard theatrical sound with the supposedmoment of truth in the film, Robbe-Grillet makes a not overly subtle commen-tary on the fictionality/illusion of truth.

Like the image-track, then, the soundtrack prevents easy identification withthe film. It urges the spectator on to stabilize the various patterns in an attemptto find meaning, at the same time that this heuristic aspect is continuallyfrustrated and denied. In his study entitled Logique du sens, Gilles Deleuzeprovides a philosophical framework for looking at the production of contradic-tory meanings in Robbe-Grillet's work as a new "logic"of meaning(s). Takingthe notion of sens or meaning back to Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, Deleuzedemonstrates that the latter group of philosophers did away with the Aristote-lian dichotomy between being and accident, or the Platonic distinction betweenmeasurable quantities and pure becoming, and concentrated instead on twoseparate types of things: bodily beings (corporels) with the necessary physicalqualities, actions, and passions and states of being resulting from reaction withother bodies; and incorporal (incorporels)or non-bodily effects, i.e., the resultsof actions and passions, logical or dialectical attributes, in short, ways of being.In a grammatical analogy, the first type corresponds to nouns, adjectives, andconjugated verbs, the second to verbs in the infinitive form (grandir,rapetisser,etc.). In a reversal of the Platonic valorization of the Idea or Being as theoverriding category of existence, the Stoics posit the extra-etre or that whichsubsumes being (bodies) and nonbeing (ways of being) as the quelque chose atthe summit of existence. In the Stoic viewpoint, emphasis is placed not only oncause but on effect, not only on depth but also on superficial movement. Thesens or production of meanings takes precedence over meaning or fixed signi-fication but in a subversive manner which relies on an acknowledgement of

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the Idea at the same time that the Idea (or image of the Idea) is contested. Thisis, of course, what happens in paradox. Deleuze points to Lewis Carroll, JamesJoyce, and to Robbe-Grillet as makers of meaning, saying of the latter:"I1 tablitses series de descriptions d'etats de choses, de designations rigoureuses, a petitesdifferences, en les faisant tourner autour de themes figes, mais propres a semodifier et a se deplacer dans chaque serie de mani&reimperceptible.6In L'Hommequi ment, various sequences and shots support this dichotomybetween depth of meaning-the Idea-and surface structures of meanings-the activity of subverting the Idea. Both pharmacy scenes include shots of Boris-Trintignant, oftentimes interchanged with Jean-Mistric, descending into a caveand clearly involved in a search for freedom which, in the context of the film,might be interpreted as a search for identity. The initial sequence, as I haveindicated, concentrates on propelling Boris-Trintignant from the depths of theforest (the unconscious) into filmic existence (identity). These scenes might belooked at as teasers that urge the spectator on to find the key to the story, toestablish chronology, plot, and character identity. Against these shots of depthis played off a predominance of horizontal shots, such as prolonged travellingsof characters passing from door to door and running through labyrinthinepassageways. These superificial shots, together with the proliferation of jumpcuts (that suggest similarity of time and space while simultaneously subvertingit) create the sensation of shadowy figures skimming along the surface of anunstable narrative. The film's linear look and ontological/teleological theme(the search for identity, etc.) are but a smokescreen for the subversion of theontological and the teleological. Deleuze points out the ludic as a rapportbetween sense and non-sense (that has a logic of its own based on an absenceof sense); that is, one can only imagine an absence of sense in relationship to apresence of sense, and it is in the activity of opposing sense to non-sense thatthe production of meaning resides. This is exactly what Robbe-Grillet has donein L'Hommequi ment. By holding on to the notion of the lie, he belies it bymaking every lie a truth in the generative structure of the creative processes ofhis film, of the film as a series of beginnings. One is reminded of the paradoxof the legendary liar from Crete who proclaimed that "all Cretans are liars."Arewe dealing with lie or truth? The answer seems to be that we are dealing withthe co-presence of two ideas, lie and truth, in the "incorporal"act of expressing/creating/writing/filming. In Robbe-Grillet's work, it is the expression of fic-tional meanings that constitutes truth.7UNIVERSITYOF FLORIDA

6 Deleuze, p. 55.7 Although not quoted in this article, other analyses of L'Hommequi ment which were consultedare the following: Dominique Chateau et Francois Jost, Nouveau Cinema,Nouvelle Semiologie:Essai

d'analysedes films d'Alain Robbe-Grillet Paris: UGE, 10/18, 1979) and the special issue of Obliques,Francois Jost, ed., 16-17 (1978).

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