Alain Robbe-Grillet

Source

• Born: 18 August 1922
• Birthplace: Brest, France
• Died: 18 February 2008
• Best Known As: The "anti-novel" guy who wrote the film Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Robbe-Grillet was the founder of the movement known as Nouveau Roman ("new novel"), a part of the French New Wave in literature and film in the 1950s. Because his novels and films avoid conventional narrative structure and character development, they are sometimes called "anti-novels." Robbe-Grillet's work has been praised by some critics as daring and challenging, and dismissed by others as just plain confusing. Though primarily known as a novelist, he was also famous for his screenplay to the Alain Resnais film L'Année Derniére á Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961). His novels include Le Voyeur (1955), La jalousie (1965) and Djinn (1981), and his films include The Immortal One (1963), Trans-Europe-Express (1966) and La Belle Captive (1983, also known as The Beautiful Prisoner).

For more information on Alain Robbe-Grillet, visit Britannica.com.

The French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (born 1922) achieved fame for his innovative techniques in writing fiction. Influential in avant-garde Paris intellectual circles, his controversial critical theories regarding the concept of the modern novel were fulfilled in his own narratives.

Born in Brest, Alain Robbe-Grillet was educated at the Lycées Buffon and St. Louis in Paris and at the Lycée de Brest. Having received his engineering degree from the National Agricultural Institute of France, he pursued a scientific career as an officer at the National Institute of Statistics in Paris from 1945 to 1948. Later, as an agronomist for the French Institute of Colonial Agriculture, he traveled extensively in the tropics, particularly Morocco, Martinique, and French Guinea, for 3 years. Robbe-Grillet joined the publishing house of Minuit as a literary director in 1955, married 2 years after, and was subsequently named a member of the High Committee for the Preservation and Expansion of the French Language.

Robbe-Grillet and his coterie - a select literary group composed of Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Bruce Morrissette, and Claude Simon - opposed the bourgeois, or Balzacian, novel of humanist tradition, preferring the geometrical precision and clinical exactitude of a scientific-literary approach. Robbe-Grillet, in particular, demonstrates a post-Sartrean sense of the alienated character and claims as the inspiration for his novels "the first fifty pages of Camus's The Stranger and the works of Raymond Rousset" (the latter is a little-known author who died in the 1930s). Critical analysis has also recognized the profound impact of the novels of Franz Kafka and Graham Greene on his work.

Known as the first "cubist" novelist and a "chosist," for his obsessive focus on inanimate objects, Robbe-Grillet initially described the nouveau roman and became the leading exponent of the New Wave in contemporary French literature. His revolutionary theories are based on the premise that man's perception of his milieu is distorted by his bourgeois background and its resulting emotionalism. Condemning the metaphorical phrasing of many existentialists, Robbe-Grillet attempts to illustrate in his fiction that all illusionary language falsely indicates a possible relationship between man and the material universe. The world is not man's domain, the novelist's essays and narratives insist, and objects exist independently of the transitory emotional content of human life. Characterized by an objective accuracy in its detailed descriptions, his writing is bare of intangible, inferential adjectives.

The Erasers (1953), Robbe-Grillet's first novel, appears to be a conventional detective thriller but thematically reworks Sophocles's Oedipus Rex. Intended as a comic parody, the narrative illustrates the chosist technique in its intense focus on the India rubber of the title as an antisymbol. Le Voyeur (1955) explores, without either conversation or interior monologue, the psychology of a rapist. The exaggerated realism of the physical descriptions imposes a dreamlike air of surrealism on this work.

The past, present, and future are juxtaposed in Jealousy (1957), an experiment with time and space elements, and humanity is characterized by mere behavior patterns, the identity of individuals being refined out of existence. The potential lushness of its tropical setting, based on Robbe-Grillet's equatorial travels, is deliberately reduced to a monochrome of color, measured distance, and tone and shape, with photographic precision. The antisymbol appears again, this time in the form of a centipede that to the nameless hero represents the image of jealousy itself. All indications of the subjective eye of the author are removed, resulting in a new literary mode. In the Labyrinth (1959) emphasizes the cinematic play of light and shadow over an endless expanse of snow. The Antonioni-like monotony of the landscape is reflected in the rhythm of language, and an unconventional attempt is made to suggest inner reality through the external vision.

At age 40 he embarked on a parallel career as screen-writer and director. Robbe-Grillet's finest effort may be the film scenario Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which reads like a novel and is written in the "continuous present." The film, directed by Alain Resnais, created considerable critical controversy and captured the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival. In this scenario, the most objectively pictorial of Robbe-Grillet's fiction, space has been created as a function of psychological time, and the internal conscious reality exists in terms of external objects with endless repetitions of long, empty corridors, baroque ceilings, mirrored walls, and formal gardens. The surprising commercial success of the film permitted its author to undertake other cinema efforts, notably The Immortal (1963), the first film he both wrote and directed and and winner of the Louis Delluc prize and Trans-Europe Express (1967).

A central figure in France's last literary movement, Le Nouveau Roman or New Novel, Robbe-Grillet published Towards a New Novel (1962), a widely acclaimed collection of essays in which he defends his literary thesis against those who say it lacks humanity; Snapshots (1962), a collection of short stories; Topology of a Phantom City (1976) and Recollections of the Golden Triangle (1978), which are primarily collages of collaborations with artists and photographers; and Djinn: a red hole between disjointed paving stones (1982), a light, humorous novel originally written as a textbook, titled Le rendez-vous (1981), with Cal State Domingues Hills Professor Yvone Lenard. Evolving from Robbe-Grillet's interest in film were two cinematic novels, The House of Assignation (1965) and Project for a Revolution in New York (1970), so called because they have the feel of a film, but are remarkably anti-visual. Robbe-Grillet also wrote and directed the films: The Slow Sliddings of Pleasure (1974), Playing with Fire (1975), The Fair Captive ((1983), and The Blue Villa (1995).

Further Reading

A three-part imaginary autobiography of Robbe-Grillet includes: Ghosts in the Mirror (1991), Angéleque, or the Enchantment (1988), and The Last Days of Corinthe (1994). For Robbe Grillet in English, see Understanding Robbe-Grillet (1997); The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on his Films (1992) by Anthony Fragola and Roch Smith; John Fletcher, Alain Robbe-Grillet (1983); Ilona Leki, Alain Robbe-Grillet (1983), Ben F. Stoltzfus, Alain Robbe-Grillet and the New French Novel (1964). See also Bruce Morrissette, Alain Robbe-Grillet (1965). Robbe-Grillet is discussed in John Sturrock, The French New Novel (1969) and Raylene Ramsay, The French New Autobiographies (1996). English criticisms of his work, include: Marjorie Hellerstein, Inventing the Real World: the Art of Alain Robbe-Grillet (1998); Lillian Dunmars Roland, Women in Robbe-Grillet: a Study in Thematics and Diegetics (1993); Raylene Ramsay, Robbe-Grillet and Modernity: Science, Sexuality, and Subversion (1992); Bruce Morrissette, Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres (1985); Patricia Deduck, Realism, Reality, and the Fictional Theory of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Anais Nin (1982); and Victor Carrabino, The Phenomenological Novel of Alain Robbe-Grille (1974).

Robbe-Grillet, Alain (b. 1922). Breton-born novelist and film-maker. In the 1960s and 1970s, Robbe-Grillet was one of the most prominent and controversial of French avant-garde writers. He launched and publicized the Nouveau Roman, through his novels and critical journalism and as editor at the Minuit publishing house. His work is based on a rejection of realism—the traditional 19th-c. novel, and also Sartre's politically committed realism. Pour un nouveau roman (1963) vigorously states Robbe-Grillet's position: the novelist must not accept any external constraints—whether literary conventions, political or moral concerns, or representational accuracy—but must let the text proceed freely, propelled only by its own formal logic. Humanist values must be replaced by a non-anthropocentric refusal of complicity between man and his environment.

His early novels—Les Gommes (1953), Le Voyeur (1955), La Jalousie (1957), Dans le labyrinthe (1959)—introduced a striking new style: his flatly precise, largely visual descriptions, eliminating figurative language and ‘human’ significance, were labelled chosiste. But this apparently objective writing creates a strangely unstable fictional reality. Thus, from about 1960 critical interpretation of his fiction—reinforced by his screenplay for Resnais's film L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), and then his own first film, L'Immortelle (1963)—swung round to the opposite pole: these were intensely subjective texts, staging a world of dream, fantasy, and obsession. The contradiction between ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ readings is sustained in Instantanés (1962), a collection of short texts characterized by a curious blurring of identity and difference. This is extended in La Maison de rendez-vous (1965), where the ‘same’ characters and events recur in different versions and on different levels of narrative. But this novel is also more explicitly ludic (as are his next two films, Trans-Europ-Express, 1966 and L'Homme qui ment, 1968)—playing games with our expectations of both narrative coherence and cultural meanings. A set of deliberately stereotyped fantasies and generic conventions—a Hong Kong brothel, drug-dealers, etc.—is combined to produce a logically impossible narrative sequence. The text is thus generated through an open-ended series of transformations of the relations between its elements. Projet pour une révolution à New York (1970) performs a similarly Structuralist operation with an underground terrorist organization in New York. Robbe-Grillet argues that this effectively subverts the dominant ideology: the generative play exposes and defuses the cultural stereotypes. In subsequent novels and films, however, the insistent repetitiveness of sadomasochistic scenes has cast doubt upon Robbe-Grillet's supposedly critical position. Topologie d'une cité fantôme (1976) and Souvenirs du triangle d'or (1978) suggest a more ambivalent involvement in the fantasies staged by the text. (Also in 1978 Le Régicide, written in 1949, appeared for the first time.) The films of this period—L'Éden et après (1971), Glissements progressifs du plaisir (1974), Le Jeu avec le feu (1975), and the later La Belle Captive (1983)—are similarly provocative and troubling. Djinn (1981) returns to a more controlled playfulness, based on grammar: a systematic progression through increasingly complex syntactic forms, it also came out in America as a language textbook, with accompanying exercises.

In 1985 Robbe-Grillet published Le Miroir qui revient, the first volume of his autobiography. For an author who had so firmly denied any relevant connections between his life and his writing, this constitutes a major volte-face. Claiming that his earlier views have become a new orthodoxy to be overthrown, he now says that all his previous fiction was, despite appearances, essentially personal. Le Miroir mixes anecdote with literary criticism, Breton folklore, and the erotic desires and fears of his childhood. The second volume, Angélique ou l'Enchantment (1988), is more exclusively concerned with sexual fantasies staged in a fairy-tale landscape. The third volume, Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe, appeared in 1993.

Robbe-Grillet is a theorist and teacher as well as a producer of fiction and film. His work has been provocative, confrontational, and often opportunist, but has always posed radical questions about the relation between cultural stereotypes, fantasy, and anti-representational structure.

[Celia Britton]

Bibliography

• O. Bernal: Alain Robbe-Grillet: le roman de l'absence (1964); Obliques, 16-17 (1978), special issue on Robbe-Grillet

• Born: Aug 18, 1922 in Brest, France
• Died: Feb 18, 2008
• Occupation: Writer, Director, Actor
• Active: '60s-'70s, '90s
• Major Genres: Avant-garde / Experimental
• Career Highlights: Last Year at Marienbad, L'Immortelle, Trans-Europ-Express
• First Major Screen Credit: Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

Biography

Influential French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, a leading figure in the French Nouveau Roman literary movement of the late '50s, strongly advocated what he called chosisme, his theory that the only reality comes from the physical, not the mental, plane; therefore, the only way to understand reality and remember it is through the manipulation of the physical, something that should be represented in writing from a purely objective level. In the work of Robbe-Grillet, the concept of time and narrative progression was more fluid -- they would begin as standard narratives, and then gradually break down into abstractions largely devoid of obvious clues as to whether events were unfolding in the past, present, or future, thereby destroying the notion of reality. In the early '60s, Robbe-Grillet joined the Left Bank movement of French literati who sought to expand the horizons of their craft through cinema when he penned the screenplay for Resnais' landmark film L'Anee Derniere a Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), a complex inward journey into the mind of a nameless woman; in so doing, the film offers a fascinating glimpse into the true nature of human memory. Two years later Robbe-Grillet debuted as a director with L'Immortelle, a film with similar themes. He continued directing, but subsequent efforts have been less innovative. By the late '70s, erotic themes, albeit highly psychoanalytical and symbolic ones, began to figure prominently in his work. Robbe-Grillet died in 2008 at age 85. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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