Les Gommes Reading Order

Les Gommes (The Erasers, 1953) by Alain Robbe-Grillet is the debut novel that launched the Nouveau Roman and one of the most celebrated French novels of the twentieth century. A police detective named Wallas arrives in a northern city (resembling a Flemish port) to investigate the apparent murder of a man named Dupont. But Dupont is not actually dead — the intended murder was interrupted before it could be completed, and Dupont is in hiding. Wallas spends a day investigating a murder that has not happened, and at the end of the day he kills Dupont himself — exactly twenty-four hours after the interrupted attempt, at exactly the time the murderer would have struck, unwittingly completing the crime he was sent to investigate. The novel draws explicitly on Oedipus Rex — Wallas is investigating a murder that turns out to be his own crime, and there are scattered references to the Oedipus myth throughout — but where Sophocles's Oedipus is a tragedy of cosmic inevitability, Robbe-Grillet's version is a detective comedy of temporal coincidence. Les Gommes is also the novel in which Robbe-Grillet first develops his distinctive 'objectal' description — the precise, dispassionate description of physical objects (a tomato, a bicycle, a shop window) as if the narrator has no emotional relationship to what they describe — which became the hallmark of the Nouveau Roman.