Alain Robbe-Grillet
born Aug.
18, 1922, Brest, France
died Feb. 18, 2008, Caen
representative writer and leading
theoretician of the nouveau roman (“new
novel”), the French “anti-novel” that
emerged in the 1950s. He was also a
screenwriter and film director.
Robbe-Grillet was trained as a statistician
and agronomist. He claimed to write novels
for his time, especially attentive “to the
ties that exist between objects, gestures,
and situations, avoiding all psychological
and ideological ‘commentary’ on the actions
of the characters” (Pour un nouveau roman,
1963; Toward a New Novel; Essays on
Fiction). Robbe-Grillet’s world is neither
meaningful nor absurd; it merely exists.
Omnipresent is the object—hard, polished,
with only the measurable characteristics of
pounds, inches, and wavelengths of reflected
light. It overshadows and eliminates plot
and character. The story is composed of
recurring images, either actually recorded
by an objective eye or drawn from
reminiscences and dreams.
If
Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, with its
timetables, careful inventories of things,
and reports on arrivals and departures, owes
anything to the traditional novel, it is to
the detective story. His first work, Les
Gommes (1953; The Erasers), deals with a
murder committed by the man who has come to
investigate it. Le Voyeur (1955; The Voyeur)
deals with the murder of a young girl by a
passing stranger. In La Jalousie (1957;
Jealousy), a jealous husband views the
actions of his wife and her suspected lover
through a louvre shutter (jalousie). Among
his later novels are Dans le labyrinthe
(1959; In the Labyrinth), Instantanés (1962;
Snapshots), La Maison de rendez-vous (1966;
The House of Assignation), Projet pour une
révolution à New York (1970; Project for a
Revolution in New York), Topologie d’une
cité famtôme (1976; Topology of a Phantom
City), Un Régicide (1978; “A Regicide”), and
Djinn (1981). Robbe-Grillet continued to
write into the early 21st century; novels
from this period include La Reprise (2001;
Repetition) and Un Roman sentimental (2007;
“A Sentimental Novel”), the latter of which
concerns incest and pedophilia. His
autobiography, Le Miroir qui revient (Ghosts
in the Mirror), was published in 1984.
Robbe-Grillet’s techniques were dramatized
in the motion pictures he directed, among
them L’Immortelle (1963; “The Immortal”),
Trans-Europ-Express (1966), and L’Homme qui
ment (1968; The Man Who Lies). His
best-known work in the medium, however, is
the screenplay for Alain Resnais’s film
L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961; Last
Year at Marienbad). Ultimately,
Robbe-Grillet’s work raises questions about
the ambiguous relationship of objectivity
and subjectivity.
Robbe-Grillet was the recipient of numerous
honours. In 2004 he was elected to the
French Academy.
