Numbers Are Important, but They Cannot Describe the Human World

We are working to bring order to what we have. It will take a little longer. We recently discovered that no one has yet given us a single book by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Why did that, of all things, surprise us? ‘The text is organised into five sections called “spaces” and identified by their ordinal number, preceded by a chapter entitled INCIPIT (five pages), followed by a chapter entitled CODA (also five pages).’ This is part of a description of his 1976 novel Topologie d’une cité fantôme. We are not numerical fetishists.

Numbers are important, but they cannot describe the human world. If they could, we would not collect sheets of paper printed with letters; we would calculate.

In the afterword to Robbe-Grillet’s House of Assignation, published by Czytelnik in early 1967, Comrade Adam Ważyk—a poet with a large Nagant—rightly wrote: ‘In Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels, people are deprived of an interior; the author confines himself to an external description of their behaviour and actions, which would not in itself be anything extraordinary, but these people move in a world without feelings or memories, and the relationships between them are reduced to mechanical, necessary relations. Someone observed that Robbe-Grillet’s people have no past.’ (Quoted in Adam Ważyk, Afterword, in Alain Robbe-Grillet, House of Assignation, translated by Wiera Bieńkowska, Warsaw, 1967, p. 191.) Mechanical relations somehow fail to amuse us. We do what we can to prevent the nouveau roman from becoming réalité actuelle. Possibly without being overly calculating.