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THRESHOLD AND LABYRINTH
I write in order to destroy, by means of an exact description, nocturnal monsters which threaten my waking hours. (Fragment autobiographique imaginaire)
Whether we are happy about it or not, Alain Robbe-Grillet is firmly out there, France’s most significant – though not necessarily greatest – living writer, a man who has changed the face of world literature for better or for worse. ‘I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet,’ announces John Fowles’s narrator in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and the mere mention of his name is sufficient to indicate that the book cannot be a novel in the traditionally received sense of the term.1 Robbe-Grillet is an inescapable presence on the literary scene, a writer with whom one may violently disagree but whom one cannot ignore; a novelist who has made it difficult – if not impossible – to write serious fiction in the classic modes inherited from the nineteenth century, at any rate not without needing to justify (as Fowles does) a decision to retain at least some of the forms of the past.
The writer who has given so many people an uneasy literary conscience is one of the great prose stylists of the French language this century, and one of the most influential figures on the intellectual landscape in France since the heyday of Sartre and Camus in the 1940s. The ignominious military collapse of France in May 1940 deeply marked people of Robbe-Grillet’s generation – he was nearly 18 at the time – and led them to question the very bases of Sartre’s political commitment to radical politics and Camus’s stoic retreat into a form of tragic humanism. Their own response was to cast doubt on entities like character and identity which their elders, however searching their political and moral inquiry, still took for granted. They perceived instability and relativity where Sartre and Camus assumed the ground to be firm, and translated their perceptions of immediacy into works of the imagination that are loosely defined as the nouveau roman. This term, which I shall return to in a moment, has achieved universal currency, the English equivalent ‘new novel’ not having caught on.
Although Sartre died only recently, in 1980, twenty years after Camus’s death in a motor accident, he had been eclipsed as a living intellectual force for some time by a brash young man whose background was not literary or philosophical at all, but who had been trained in the applied sciences. Alain Robbe-Grillet even had an improbable name for a literary person; he was later felt to have made a pun on it in Project for a Revolution in New York, when he refers to a girl who burns a triangular hole in the pubic region of her dress. Critics were not slow to see this as ‘à l’ aine robe grillée’ or ‘dress charred in the groin’ .2 Intellectuals are not well known in France for a readiness to make fun of themselves, but in this, as in so much else, Robbe-Grillet is an exception.
Surprisingly for someone who still looks young, Robbe-Grillet is now over 60. He was born on 18 August 1922, the child of what he has called ‘extreme right-wing anarchists’ . He grew up mainly in Paris, but the Brittany of his birth and the high Jura region his father came from were parts of France he frequently visited as a boy. Memories of these places are imprinted on the fiction: The Voyeur, for instance, is set on an island off the Breton coast. The young Robbe-Grillet was sexually precocious, indulging in ‘solitary pleasures which were already strongly marked by sadism’ .3 He was educated at lycées in Paris and Brest and at the Institut National Agrono-mique; he passed the agrégation d’ agronomie in 1945, then went overseas to conduct biological research, but was repatriated in 1951 for health reasons. In 1955 he became literary adviser at the Editions de Minuit – a post he still holds – where he has had particular responsibility for the fiction list. In 1957 he married Catherine Rstakian; they have no children. Catherine Robbe-Grillet is of more than incidental interest: she may well have written a pornographic novel called L’ Image (1956) which reads as if it were inspired by Robbe-Grillet, and she has acted in secondary parts in some of his films. In French women’s magazines and in Paris gossip generally, they are reputed to be a very close but sexually unconventional couple.
Robbe-Grillet is, however, a very private person, and not much is known about his life. He did spend some time in Nuremberg under the German forced labour scheme during the war, but he has said little about this beyond the fact that the factory which is the setting of his first novel may be identified with the one he worked in. His literary beginnings were modest: a few early poems have been published in the Robbe-Grillet special number of the review Obliques; so too has a text of 1947 describing a young people’s visit to Bulgaria. He is a slow and meticulous worker, and his total output is not large. In any case, as a research scientist he did not at first have much time for writing. Nevertheless he did finish his first novel in 1949; it was, however, rejected by the leading Paris publishers and published only in 1978. Entitled Un Régicide, it is a novel of anxiety and enigma, of humour tinged with fear as in Hitchcock, where terror is undermined by laughter, the comic dimension of mystery. It is ‘about’ the murder of a king (hence the title) which does not come off – indeed, seems to have been purely a figment of the hero’s imagination – and it has so much in common with later works that, if one did not know it had genuinely existed since 1949, one would be tempted to think that Robbe-Grillet created it much later in a riot of self-pastiche.
In this book there is a ‘last year’ as in Marienbad, a large black dog as in The Immortal One, an island as in The Voyeur, repulsive insects as in Jealousy, a destroyed town as in Topology of a Phantom City, and fear of being cut off by the rising tide as in Snapshots. Its early composition is, however, betrayed by its derivativeness: it owes a lot to surrealism – to which the scale of Robbe-Grillet’s debt is clearer now than would have been the case in 1949 if it had been published then – and it is also influenced by the authors Robbe-Grillet read at the time, an unlikely combination of Graham Greene, James Cain, Franz Kafka and Raymond Roussel. Robbe-Grillet is unconventional even in his reading, believing that it is not, as Malraux thought, familiarity with great works which alone encourages one to write, but that quite minor books can stimulate creativity. Thus the influence on The Erasers of Graham Greene, whom Robbe-Grillet considers only a second-rate author, exists side by side with an admiration for the very highbrow novelist Maurice Blanchot, whom most people in the English-speaking world have probably heard of only as a literary critic.
As important to Robbe-Grillet as what he read was his encounter with experimental science. His specialism was research into diseases affecting such tropical fruits as the banana (Jealousy is set in a banana plantation, and he lived for a time in the sort of spacious colonial house that is minutely described in the book). For him, science is not so far removed from literature as proponents of the ‘two cultures’ would have us believe. Thus, characteristically, he observed in 1975 that ‘science does not aim to cover exhaustively the whole of reality, but to construct systems and concepts which will perhaps – and it is a big perhaps – allow man to act on the world.’4 In like manner he suggested that ‘mineralogy, botany and zoology seek knowledge of textures (both internal and external), of their organization, functioning and genesis’, the implication of this remark, in Towards a New Novel (STNN, p. 92), being that literature, or any other art form, is wasting its time if it attempts to penetrate the essence of things. It is undoubtedly his scientific background which inspires Robbe-Grillet to make such trenchant assertions.
His scientific career is now at an end, however, and literature – evidently always his deepest passion – is now his livelihood. But he is and always has been a poet, not much in verse, but a great deal in prose of this measured and elegiac kind:
It speaks of calm, fertile valleys and of village festivals: after a day spent in the grape harvest the new wine is drunk straight from the press, and then as the sun sets you fall drunkenly asleep with the washer-women, encircled in their white arms. (Un Régicide, p. 117)
In spite of considerable notoriety – and respectable sales around the world, with as many as 40 per cent of his works in French being sold outside France – Robbe-Grillet is hardly a popular writer, and he claims that no one has ever really understood what it is he is trying to achieve. There is some truth in this. As recently as 1971, in fact, Roger Poole could write that he ‘despises humanism’ and prides himself on ‘rising above the weakness of human nature’,5 whereas the facts are that he goes to great lengths in Towards a New Novel and elsewhere to make clear that, far from setting himself above other people, he has all the normal emotions and weaknesses – and that the only humanism he feels contempt for is the facile anthropocentric fallacy of nineteenth-century positivism, and the reaction to it in the guise of Camus’s tragic pessimism. Since he has no religious belief, he would even claim, somewhat indignantly, that in his world humanity is on the contrary supreme, because it is alone, subordinated to no one and nothing in the universe.
The blurb on a 1962 mass-market reprint of Robbe-Grillet’s first published novel made the following comment:
The ‘new novel’, which has deeply marked literature of the up-and-coming variety, recognizes in Alain Robbe-Grillet its theorist and trail-blazer. This new vision of people and of the world finds in Robbe-Grillet’s novel its most striking exemplar.
That statement is typical of many that have been made, not only in France but throughout the world, since The Erasers was published in 1953, but like other journalistic statements it oversimplifies what have been complex and even contradictory elements in the novels’ reception. There are in fact almost as many Robbe-Grillets as there are critics of his work. Early French reactions were predictably hostile and uncomprehending – the equivalent, on the literary level, of the ‘pot of paint flung in the public’s face’sort of criticism – but these soon gave way, in serious organs of opinion, to more thoughtful responses. In 1954 the then relatively little-known Roland Barthes published a highly influential essay on The Erasers, and on one or two of the short texts later collected under the title Snapshots. This offered a philosophical interpretation which stressed the epistemological questioning at the heart of Robbe-Grillet’s enterprise and projected him as a chosiste, the founder of an école du regard, which has remained for many the standard image of this writer. A decade later, in his seminal book Les Romans de Robbe-Grillet (1963), Bruce Morrissette moved away from Barthes’s phenomenological stance almost to the other extreme, and adopted a psychological approach which stressed the subjectivity, accurately recorded, of the total vision of Robbe-Grillet’s fictional world, and the obsessive quality of his narrators.
Younger critics such as Stephen Heath later drew attention to the possibility of a linguistics-based criticism which stressed the novelist as user of language in a world in which language is reality, not merely its vehicle or what encodes it. Heath’s book, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (1972), was a development of the work of Roland Barthes in S/Z and in other explorations of the theory of fiction. A more narrowly linguistic line was meanwhile being pursued in France by the critic and novelist Jean Ricardou, and his writings, especially Pour une théorie du nouveau roman (1971), have been interpreted, adapted and humanized for English-speaking readers by Ann Jefferson in her monograph The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (1980). This argues that language creates ambiguity and paranoia in Robbe-Grillet’s teleological structures; our view of history, Jefferson concludes, is ‘coloured by our view of the language through which it is constructed, and our view of that language is equally determined by the kind of history which it elaborates.’6
In so energetically precipitating definitions in this way, Robbe-Grillet’s novels reveal their strangeness (as well, paradoxically, as their richness, at first glance an unlikely word to apply to writing of this kind); but they also raise the suspicion that sophisticated approaches like these not only feed off but also in their own way provoke the sort of text Robbe-Grillet has been writing recently. In these later works, based on mise-en-abyme – a technical term which covers infinite regression, reflexivity and self-quotation, and is perhaps most simply exemplified by the play-within-the-play in Hamlet – the influences of other French critics and theorists can be discerned in a manner often to the detriment of the interest and originality of Robbe-Grillet’s writing itself. The close relationship between Jean Ricardou and Robbe-Grillet seems particularly incestuous in this respect. Ricardou – who was a member for a time of the famous group of intellectuals led by Philippe Sollers, closely associated with the avant-garde journal Tel Quel – is at once a formidable theorist, an interesting critic and a novelist of small talent. Only the genius of Claude Simon (a nouveau romancier who is Robbe-Grillet’s senior by some nine years) has been able to withstand the onslaught of this devastating combination, which has the same effect on literary fertility as the arrival of a particularly hungry swarm of locusts on a field of ripe corn. Robbe-Grillet, perhaps because he is not such a singleminded and obstinately self-obsessed creator as Simon, sometimes gives the impression of having been stripped bare by the locusts.
Whatever reservations one has about some of Robbe-Grillet’s friends and fellow theorists, though, they have the merit of proclaiming unambiguously the revolutionary importance of his writing. The time has now come, perhaps – it is after all over thirty years since his first book appeared – for a closer look at their claim, not with an iconoclastic and quite misplaced urge to dismiss his significance, but to take advantage of the perspective an interval of three decades or more gives us to take stock of the real achievement of a writer whose name is synonymous, wherever contemporary literature is discussed, with a radically new approach not merely to the writing of fiction but to an understanding of the world. The present study might be subtitled ‘How to Stop Being Frightened of the Nouveau Roman and to Begin Liking Robbe-Grillet’. My approach is different from that of previous critics – the most important of whose works are listed in the bibliography – because I look at the total impact of the writing and not just at its language, its treatment of objects, or its departures from conventional narrative. I do not always follow Robbe-Grillet’s own assertions of intent; but then does he not say himself that one of his diatribes against metaphor is exactly contemporaneous with Jealousy, which ‘from its title to the least of its insects is a huge snare of metaphorical readings’ (Ob., p. 2)?
Robbe-Grillet is an ironist and a joker who ‘pinches without a smile’, as the French say, so the reader is even more justified than usual in not accepting the writer’s account of his intentions as being all there is to be said. Indeed, if we take too seriously some utterances of the polemical Robbe-Grillet, and even more those of his acolytes like Jean Ricardou, we end in an impasse. He becomes a writer’s writer of the most rarefied kind, an experimental, ‘laboratory’ novelist whose appeal to a wide circle of readers around the world becomes a mystery. As I indicated, a large proportion of his French-language books are exported; he has been translated into every major world language; he is an essential point of reference wherever contemporary literature is mentioned or ...
