In his first novel, Les Gommes, Robbe-Grillet deliberately exploits the potency of the Oedipus myth, while simultaneously undermining its pretensions to significance. Once the myth is planted in the text, a sculpture of a Greek chariot becomes fraught with meaning: station announcements become oracular, and snippets of news in the newspaper take on Delphic profundity. It is not only the central figure, Wallas, who is trapped, but readers too are caught in the snare of words. Readers determined to make sense of the latent symbolism of the Tarot cards, of the rue de Corinthe, the picture of Thebes, and so on, are likely to make of the novel a reworking of the Oedipus myth. But the fact that the image of the Sphinx, seen in a canal, is only a momentary configuration of bits of paper and orange peel should give us pause…. [The] inclusion of a report on the state of the potato crop in the newspaper "oracle" is discouraging to symbolic interpretation. The famous riddle of the Oedipus myth is here presented only as a muddled conundrum on the lips of a drunk. Robbe-Grillet is in fact both exploiting the myth, and simultaneously undermining the mythologising impulse. He draws attention to the insidious patterns of association as they arise, and from time to time renders them ludicrous by giving them an ironic pat on the head.
We seem here to observe language in the very act of generating associative series and systems: a mention of swollen feet or a whisper of Corinth generates a whole mythical infrastructure; a reference to espionage and the Café des Alliés evokes passages crediting Fabius with an exciting wartime past…. The repetitive and associative forces that are apt to influence narration are not here discarded or concealed but exhibited and exploited with considerable wit. Despite his explicit disengagement from moralism, Robbe-Grillet's aesthetic concerns lead him in fact to examine the processes of a kind of linguistic determinism from which only awareness can free us. (pp. 37-8)
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