Monday Seminar:
Richard Goodkin
Senior Fellow (2009-2014)
French and Italian, UW-Madison
What sort of narrative might result from the implausible marriage of mathematics and literature? As an example of such an unlikely union, in this seminar, I will discuss Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur (1955), whose hero, a watch-salesman named Mathias (“Math” for short), spends a large percentage of the novel carrying out mathematical operations in his head. These range from the average number of minutes he must take to sell the items in his suitcase in the amount of time he has allotted himself, to the geometrical configuration of various objects he observes, to the number of minutes he has taken to bicycle between locations on the island he has traveled to on a business trip.
To some extent the novel’s mathematical perspective is no great surprise given the fact that before becoming a novelist, Robbe-Grillet, one of the main practitioners of the French Nouveau Roman or New Novel, was trained as an engineer; moreover, from 1945 to 1949 he worked for the Institut National de la Statistique, the official statistics-gathering arm of the French government. And yet far from being a bloodless exercise, Le Voyeur is actually a peculiar kind of murder mystery: establishing an inventory of how he has spent his time turns out to have a particular importance to Mathias because of a period of fifty minutes for which he cannot account, during which time a young shepherdess either accidentally fell to her death from a sea cliff or was brutally murdered. We are strongly led to believe that Mathias himself, who has persistent troubling fantasies—or are they plans, or memories?—of other violent acts, is the murderer, but we never know for sure, largely because the character, who is obviously desperate to conform and not to draw attention to himself for reasons we also never discover, shares the flat affect and detached, disjointed perspective of many post-World War II literary figures; he reads like a humanoid lacking a user’s manual about how to act like a “normal” person. His identification as a “voyeur” suggests not only that he suffers from some sexual “deviancy” which is strongly hinted at but never detailed, but also that, more generally, he observes others living their lives without being able to draw upon even the most basic notions about how he himself is supposed to act. Thus the novel’s focus is on what one might call, in the wake of Arendt’s “banality of evil,” the banality not only of normativity—that is to be expected—but also of the “deviation”—both statistical and psychological—that it implies.
Richard E. Goodkin is Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a specialist of seventeenth-century French literature but has also worked on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on ancient Greek tragedy. His research interests include intertextuality, the study of genre, literature, and philosophy, literature and mathematics, and French film. His books include The Tragic Middle: Racine, Aristotle, Euripides (Wisconsin, 1991), Around Proust(Princeton, 1991), and Birth Marks: The Tragedy of Primogeniture in Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine(Pennsylvania, 2000). He is also the editor of Autour de Racine: Studies in Intertextuality (Yale French Studies, 1989) and In Memory of Elaine Marks: Life Writing, Writing Death (Wisconsin, 2007). He is presently completing a manuscript entitled How Do I Know Thee, Let Me Count the Ways? The Representation of Personality in Early Modern French Comedy and Narrative, a project for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005-2006.