Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008), French novelist, essayist, and screenplay writer. He was regarded as the father of the 1950s nouveau roman (literally, “new novel”), a genre also known as the anti-novel in which time, place, and point of view are generally disregarded in an attempt to capture a more basic reality than that expressed through conventional fictional techniques (see Novel). For Robbe-Grillet the essential fact of experience was the way the mind fastens onto particular scenes and objects, an obsessiveness that he conveys through minute attention to visual details. In his novels he presents a view of the world as if the narrator were a filmmaker simply capturing images.

Robbe-Grillet was born August 18, 1922, in Brest, France. He graduated from the National Agricultural College in 1945 and was employed by the National Institute of Statistics and the Citrus Fruits Institute. In 1955 he became literary adviser for Éditions de Minuit (Midnight Editions), his publisher.

Robbe-Grillet’s first novel, Les Gommes (published in 1953; translated into English as The Erasers, 1964), retells the Oedipus story under the complicated disguise of mystery. It contains most of the author’s characteristic techniques and is considered the key to his entire work. Robbe-Grillet began to gain a reputation with the publication of Le Voyeur (1955; The Voyeur, 1958), a portrayal of the hypnotic obsessions of a pervert, and La Jalousie (1957; Jealousy, 1959), which is often considered his most successful novel. La Jalousie has almost no action. It contains meticulously detailed descriptions of inanimate objects and reduces the characters to initials. The narrator is an unmentioned recording eye, detached in tone but obsessively involved with objects and events related to his wife’s affair with another man. The time sequence of the narrative is disrupted by endless repetitions of the same episodes. Robbe-Grillet’s fourth novel, Dans le Labyrinthe (1959; In the Labyrinth, 1960), is a nightmarish evocation of the modern city, a theme echoed in Project pour une revolution à New York (1970; Project for a Revolution in New York, 1972) and in Topologie d’une Cité Fantôme (1976; Topology of a Phantom City, 1977).

In the early 1960s Robbe-Grillet turned to motion pictures, first with the screenplay for director Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961; Last Year at Marienbad), published as a “cinenovel” in 1961, then with the text of Robbe-Grillet’s own film L’Immortelle (1963; The Immortal One), a mystery set in Ýstanbul, Turkey, that the author directed himself. While he returned to writing fiction in 1965, with La Maison de rendez-vous (translated 1966), he continued to make films.

Robbe-Grillet’s preeminence among French new novelists was partly due to the forcefulness of his theoretical statements. In various writings, collected in 1963 under the general title Pour un Nouveau Roman (For a New Novel, 1965), he called for an end to the traditional novel, whose clearly defined plot and well-rounded hero no longer correspond to the individual’s marginal position in the modern world. Instead, Robbe-Grillet advocated the need to “cleanse literature of anthropomorphic distortions,” that is, to describe nature and things as they really are, in objective and, especially, visual terms, without projecting human feelings onto them. Reflecting this view, his novels have been characterized as chosiste, or “thing-oriented.”

Beginning in the middle of the 1960s Robbe-Grillet, both in essays and in fiction, moved toward a new humanism, stressing the creative power of the imagination. The perceiving, remembering minds of his characters became increasingly free to mix reality and dreams, the past, present, and future, and logic and irrationality, all of which are equivalent in the mind’s imaginary world. Amid the apparent confusion, it is nevertheless possible to distinguish motifs and well-organized networks of imagery, often of an erotic nature.

Other works by Robbe-Grillet include Djinn (1981; Djinn, 1982); Angélique, ou, L’Enchantement (1987); Les derniers jours de Corinthe (1994); and La reprise (2001; Repetition, 2003). In his novel La belle captive (1975; Belle Captive, 1994), several dozen artworks by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte are accompanied by stories that—directly or indirectly—elucidate the works or reflect on them.