Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet (born Aug. 18, 1922, Brest, France—died Feb. 18, 2008, Caen) was a 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.

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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.