Aika toistaa

Abstract

Time to reprise. From Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La reprise, through Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, to Michel Houellebecq’s novel La possibilité d’une île – and back again In this article I examine time as a durational entity in two recently published French novels, La reprise (2001) by Alain Robbe-Grillet and La possibilité d’une île (2005) by Michel Houellebecq. My premise concerning time is that repetition (or reprise) establishes all duration, but on the other hand the experience of time also needs difference. In other words, with the extreme repetition of the same, time disappears. My premise concerning the works of art is that every artwork carries (its unique) time, or duration, in its composition. How, then, is it possible to set up a durational immanence of time in literature, especially in its discursive continuum? In literary texts, such as Robbe-Grillet’s and Houillebeck’s novels, this must be executed through durational meaning. Both novels use repetition (or reprise) as their main strategy to create time (or timelessness), but the outcome is opposite. Robbe-Grillet develops an image of enriched duration as a “cathedral of thinking”, as he himself has put it. La reprise is a reprise of Robbe-Grillet’s earlier oeuvre. The thematic variations create a rhizomatic universe of meaning, which is characteristic for the great music dramas of Richard Wagner. In Robbe-Grillet’s novel the narrator doubles himself, and the novel creates two different textual universes: the body text and the footnote text. Two narrator voices fight with each other. This structural technique creates a strong web of durational meaning. In his “clone novel” Houellebecq clones time so that durational meaning, and thus time, almost vanishes, so that in the end of the novel the future horizon is totally empty. This effect is created also through the use of language and thematic of scientific humanism laced with discourses of libidinal capitalism. According to Houellebecq the pessimist, even Wagner’s art cannot comfort him anymore. Science has won all art. However the emptiness of time in his novel’s last page already creates a new promise. The death of art is as impossible as the death of durational mind, the fabulatrix.