Le Nouveau Roman

nouveau roman, le [noo‐voh roh‐mahⁿ], the French term (‘new novel’) applied since the mid‐1950s to experimental novels by a group of French writers who rejected many of the traditional elements of novel‐writing, such as the sequential plot and the analysis of characters' motives. The leading light of this group was Alain Robbe‐Grillet, whose essays on the novel in Pour un nouveau roman (1963) argue for a neutral registering of sensations and things rather than an interpretation of events or a study of characters: these principles were put into practice most famously in his anti‐novel La Jalousie (1957). Other notable nouveaux romans include Nathalie Sarraute's Le Planétarium (1959) and Michel Butor's La Modification (1957); Sarraute's Tropismes (1938) is often cited as the first nouveau roman.

Nouveau Roman, Le. In the mid-1950s the name ‘Nouveau Roman’ was given to the work of a group of writers who saw themselves as challenging the traditional conception of the novel, particularly the conventions governing plot and characterization. Opinions differed somewhat as to who counted as a nouveau romancier, but the central figures—at first—were Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget (Marguerite Duras was also often associated with them, but she was never interested in belonging to a group). All these novelists wanted to create a ‘new realism’ that would more adequately convey contemporary reality, but each of them interpreted the task in a different way. For Robbe-Grillet it meant asserting the separateness of external reality from man's anthropocentric projections; for Sarraute, the deconstruction of ‘character’ to reveal a hitherto unformulated level of psychological interaction; for Butor, an awareness of the historical and cultural basis of our vision of reality, and so on.

Despite these differences, however, they were further united by a common emphasis on the seriousness of fiction, considered as a means of enlightenment rather than mere entertainment. This was also Sartre's view; but the nouveaux romanciers disagreed with his conception of writing as an act of political commitment. Several vehement exchanges between him and Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Simon (Butor, on the other hand, remained close to Sartre) gave the Nouveau Roman additional publicity. Indeed, one of the group's main characteristics from the beginning was the importance they attached to the theory, as well as the practice, of fiction. Sarraute's L'Ère du soupçon (1956) and Robbe-Grillet's Pour un nouveau roman (1963) played as great a role as the novels themselves in establishing the identity of the Nouveau Roman. Their status as intellectual, avant-garde writers—associated with Barthes, for instance, who wrote articles praising Robbe-Grillet and Butor—has persisted; as the initial controversial impact of their novels wore off, they have figured on many university syllabuses, and most of the authors have lectured extensively at universities throughout Europe and America.

To some extent, the collective existence of the group was a creation of the media. After an initially hostile response, they were promoted by L' Express and by the Minuit publishing house, where Robbe-Grillet's position as editor ensured that he, Butor (until 1960), Simon, and Pinget were all ‘Minuit writers’. Moreover, they began to be seen as the most significant writers of the period; 1957, which saw the publication of Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie, Butor's La Modification, Simon's Le Vent, and the re-edition, by Minuit, of Sarraute's Tropismes, established a dominance which lasted for at least the next decade. In 1964, for instance, the three novelists selected by the European Community of Writers to represent France at a conference in Leningrad were Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Butor (although illness prevented him from attending).

But their public success led to increasing tensions within the corporate identity of the Nouveau Roman, as the differences between individual members became more difficult to overlook. This process was greatly exacerbated by Jean Ricardou who, along with Claude Ollier, was a slightly later recruit to the group. Ricardou was on the editorial board of the journal Tel Quel, whose promotion of Structuralist- Marxist literary theory both influenced and threatened the work of the Nouveau Roman. His attempt to define the collective project of the latter more rigorously than hitherto, and the dogmatic fervour with which he imposed his definition on the group, in fact precipitated its partial break-up. The argument centred on realism, which Ricardou, following Tel Quel, saw as complicitous with bourgeois ideology. Therefore, he argued the Nouveau Roman should not attempt to represent or express the real in any way at all; it was no longer a question of renewing realism but eliminating it altogether in favour of a subversive free play of language. Butor and Sarraute were unable to accept this. This conflict came to a head at a conference at Cerisy which Ricardou organized in 1971: here he consolidated his dominance over the remaining nouveaux romanciers, going on to organize further conferences on Simon (1974) and Robbe-Grillet (1976). But while Robbe-Grillet's fiction had always had a provocative, playfully anti-realist dimension, Simon's acceptance of the new line necessitated a major reorientation in his work in the 1970s until, finally and dramatically, he rebelled against Ricardou with the publication of Les Géorgiques in 1981. At a conference held in New York in 1982, Simon, Sarraute, Pinget, and Robbe-Grillet himself asserted their collective rejection of Ricardou, and the futility of any attempt to prescribe what their individual novels should be like.

There is thus a sense in which the nouveaux romanciers outlived the Nouveau Roman. They all continued to be productive throughout the 1980s, and much of their work in this period was characterized by a revalorization of real-life individual experience, e.g. the autobiographical texts of Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, and Simon. But this was the only remaining common feature. The emphasis on clarifying and theorizing collective aims had entirely disappeared. Ricardou continued to develop his theories under the new title of ‘textique’; Butor's work had for some time ceased to be fictional in any conventional sense; Robbe-Grillet was almost exclusively concerned with the textual and filmic representation of his sexual fantasies; and the others had remained remarkably faithful to their original individual concerns. They now looked back on the earlier phases of the Nouveau Roman with some scepticism and disillusionment.

But while it is true that the collective project eventually proved unrealizable, the contribution it made to the evolution of the novel is still extremely important. The significance of the Nouveau Roman is, in the first place, that of a group of writers theorizing their own fictional practice, engaging actively with wider contemporary intellectual movements (Marxism, Structuralism, psychoanalysis), and in the process generating a debate which, if at times confused or acrimonious, was always lively, demystifying, and insightful. Equally, they have produced some of the major French novels of the 20th c. [See Novel In France, 4.

[Celia Britton]

Bibliography

• S. Heath; The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (1972)
• J. Ricardou and F. van Rossum-Guyon (eds.), Le Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd'hui, 2 vols. (1972)
• A. Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (1980)