The Erasers is one of the most convoluted, complex, knotty novels a reader could possibly encounter, a novel that can be approached from multiple perspectives and on multiple levels, everything from an intricate detective mystery to a meditation on the circularity of time, from the phenomenology of perception to the story of Oedipus, to name several. For the purpose of this review, I will focus on one aspect of The Erasers I have not seen from scholars, literary critics or reviewers – the prevalence of ugliness in the city where the novel is set.With its winding streets and system of canals, the novel’s city has been likened to Amsterdam, but any likeness to this beautiful, charming Dutch city ends there. The cold Northern European industrial city we encounter in The Erasers is ugly and creepy, lacking any trace of charm or warmth. The main character, special agent Wallas, who travels to the city to solve a murder, repeatedly reflects on this lack of aesthetic attraction and beauty. For example, we read, “ . . . a city completely barren of appeal for an art lover . . . “, and then again, “ . . . a huge stone building ornamented with scrolls and scallops, fortunately few in number – in short, of rather somber ugliness.” From Wallas’s multiple observations, this unnamed city’s stark ugliness brings to my mind Golconda by the surrealist Rene Magritte, a painting of a cityscape raining men in black suits and bowlers, painted in the same year as the publication of The Erasers.This unattractiveness also extends to the people inhabiting the city. Two men described in some detail are both fat and flabby and move in a stiff and mechanical way: first, the manager of the café, portrayed as follows: “A fat man is standing here, the manager . . . greenish, his features blurred, liverish, and fleshy in his aquarium.”, and second, Laurent, the chief commissioner: “He is a short, plump man with a pink face and a bald skull . . . his overfed body shakes from fits of laughter.”Tom, one of the condemned prisoners, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s story The Wall is such a flabby, fat man. Also, Antoine Roquentin, the main character in Sartre’s novel Nausea, describes shaking hands with another fat man: “Then there was his hand like a fat white worm in my own hand. I dropped it almost immediately and the arm fell back flabbily.” So, why do I highlight this? Because I have the sense both Robbe-Grillet and Sartre (who had a great influence on Robbe-Grillet) saw flab and fat as repulsive and ugly, a counter to the possibility of freedom and spontaneity and fluidity we can experience in our human embodiment.In contradistinction, Wallas is a tall, calm young man with regular features and who walks with an elastic, confident gate. But at every turn Wallas encounters ugliness, even in an automat where there is a sign reading: ‘Please Hurry. Thank you’, And this sign is repeated many times on the white walls of the automat. How nauseating! Not surprisingly, Wallas eats too fast, resulting in an upset stomach. Shortly thereafter he returns to a familiar dirty café and he continues to feel ill.Here are few more direct quotes on what Wallas sees in this city:• “Mouth open, the man is staring into space, one elbow on the table propping up his bloated head.”• “Once again, Wallas is walking toward the bridge. Ahead of him, under a snowy sky, extends the Rue de Brabant – and its grim housefronts.”• “From another angle, the man assumes an almost coarse expression that has something vulgar, self-satisfied, rather repugnant about it.”True, Wallas encounters one saleswoman who is upbeat and slightly provocative, but the other people he encounters, to the extent these men and woman are described, are drab and shabby and decidedly unattractive. An entire city of unsightly sights and repellent people. Is it too much of a stretch to interpret the pistol Wallas shoots at the end of the novel as, in part, a reaction to overbearing ugliness? Perhaps in the same way the pistol shots in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (a work Alain Robbe-Grillet counts as one of his prime influences) are a reaction to the searing heat and glare from the sun and the young Arab’s knife blade?Rather than providing a definitive answer, this raises another question: Are we as readers so coarse and dull and deadened by the modern mechanized world that we accept the ugly as the norm? Does this acceptance account for the fact that all the essays and reviews I have read on this novel do not draw attention to the ugliness Wallas confronts?
In an odd twist of fate, Alain Robbe-Grillet died the same week that I finally finished reading his debut novel, The Erasers. I don’t ascribe any importance to that, it was just odd. The Erasers reminds me of Black Sabbath's Black Sabbath or The Stooges The Stooges or Metallica's Kill 'Em All or Public Enemy's Yo! Bum Rush the Show. There is something great here, it isn't perfected yet, but there is hint of something amazing to come. This grand experiment will yield a Paranoid or a Fun House or a Master of Puppets or a It Takes A Nation of Millions….In many ways, The Erasers is the most ‘conventional’ of Robbe-Grillet’s novels if for no other reason than it was his first stab at the New Novel. On the surface, the story can even be perceived as a more intricate form of crime fiction. In a small seaside town, Daniel Dupont, a professor, becomes the ninth victim in nine days of an unknown assassin. Theories abound as to the murder’s true identity: a terrorist group unhappy with the professor’s political leanings or a long lost bastard child. Arriving in town the day after the murder is one Detective Wallas who has been sent to investigate the murder. And so it begins…Over a 24-hour period, Robbe-Grillet has us following Wallas, wandering down blind alleys, retracing steps, replaying scenes over and over again, as he would in Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. We are introduced to the assassin, or are we? We meet many witnesses, but have they actually seen anything? Soon we are forced to ask a disturbing question: Is Wallas in fact the assassin? Is he investigating himself much like Gian Maria Volontè’s police inspector in the classic Elio Petri film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. The twisting labyrinthine plot – what would become Robbe-Grillet’s hallmark – draws you into the story, taking it to a psychological level that most crime novels (and lesser authors) are unable to achieve. You are forced to consider the possibility that Wallace has a dark side to his character that even his own brain will not reveal to the reader (something RG used even more effectively in The Voyeur). Only by ‘tailing’ Wallas do we start to see the pieces of the disjointed puzzle pulled together and ultimately the grim, inevitable outcome.In The Erasers, Robbe-Grillet has not completely abandoned traditional use of character and plot. There is a storyline here, but it is condensed into a frenetic series of meetings, arguments, subterfuge, and yes, murders. We are left with dead ends, miscues, faulty memories, and cryptic messages that the confound the reader as much as Wallas. It is this aspect that can turn someone away; the plot is not laid out as a simple series of events and an impatient readers quickly shut down. But compared to Robbe-Grillet’s later novels, The Erasers is a great entry point to his writing, the rabbit-hole if you will. As I said, I don’t consider The Erasers to be Robbe-Grillet’s finest work. He is a young sprite, playing with new ideas. He wouldn’t hit his stride until Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. But my god, what a hell of a debut. And still more infinitely fascinating and perfectly executed than the endless train of ‘meta-novels’ unleashed in years after by lesser writers. It stands in the shadows of Robbe-Grillet’s later work, but still exists as one of the great experiments in novel writing. And more importantly, the story is still intriguing, fascinating, and addictive.
What do You think about The Erasers (1994)?
Robbe-Grillet's first, I think, and a bit more conventional than "Jalousie" and others, though his obsessive objectivism is often manifest - the exact number of times the cafe proprietor moves his cloth around the table to shine it, the exact number of inches the chair sits from the table, and so on.Set in 1950s Belgium, the story is almost an anti-whodunit about a ring of political assassins - you are told right at the outset who commits a shooting on whom, but the endless layering of speculation as the characters in the story who don't know and begin theorizing eventually makes you feel that you yourself don't know what actually happened. Compounding this, the murder victim was apparently not fatally shot but decides to pretend he is dead, confusing even the assassin who knows deep down that he shot imperfectly. I haven't even given everything away as there are further twists and subtleties - quite remarkable!
—Bob
This is (I think) Robbe-Grillet's first novel, so his writing style isn't in full effect yet. My initial feeling was that his style only works when taken to his characteristic extreme, and therefore this was actually a bit disappointing. But as I got further, I realized that even if it's a bit lacking in that area, it still has pretty much everything else you would want in a Robbe-Grillet novel. As always, he only shows and never tells, and he leaves it up to you to connect the dots. Unfortunately my life has been a bit chaotic lately and I only got to read this in disconnected spurts, so some of those dots remained unlinked for me. But it still gave me that chilling sense of uncertainty and deja vu that he pulls off so well, and the climax was suitably chilling.
—Hamish
i hate crap like this. the author constructs a detective novel-like plot and then proceeds to weave in all kind of confusion and inconsistency in order to make it into serious, postmodern literature. the critics evidently bought all the shit he was selling, because this guy is supposed to be a big deal. if paul auster was french (which he probably wishes he was in the instants of insecurity when he momentarily doubts that new york is at the precise center of the literary universe) and had been born thirty years earlier, he would have produced exactly this pretentious, deliberately obfuscatory, literary cop-out.
—dead letter office
