In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Published in 1957, as the nouveau roman was rising on the Parisian literary scene, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel La Jalousie [Jealousy] produced in many of its first readers a reaction of puzzlement and consternation. Alain Robbe-Grillet (French author, filmmaker and leader of the mid-Twentieth Century Nouveau Roman, ‘New. Novel’ movement) argued that ambiguity, disjunction and chance, rather than order, identity and significance, are the principal. Excerpts from Robbe-Grillet’s two works, In the Labyrinth and Last Year at Marienbad with.
18, 1922, in Brest, department of Finistere. French writer and film director; one of the founders of the “new novel.” Educated as an agricultural engineer, Robbe-Grillet was first published in 1953. In his depersonalized, flat narratives, Robbe-Grillet’s obsessive description of objects pushes aside both the narrative and the characters (for example, the novels The Voyeur, 1955, and Jealousy, 1957).
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Gradually these verbal still lifes grow into hallucinations of a chaotic, capricious, and defective world (the novel In the Labyrinth, 1959, and the film screenplay Last Year at Marienbad, 1961). This world cannot be animated by criminal events (the novel La Maison de rendez-vous, 1965), by a speculative response to political issues of the day (the novel Project for a Revolution in New York, 1970), or by morbid eroticism (the novel and film Glissements progressifs du plaisir, 1973).
E ssay by Ted Gioia For a few brief decades in the 20th century important writers were expected to break the rules, violate all conventions, and in general rock the bloody boat. Instead of garnering praise by mastering the techniques of the trade, they made their name by subverting the accepted methodologies. In Ulysses, James Joyce inserted a single sentence that ran on for 4,391 words—longer than many short stories. In Gadsby (1939) Ernest Vincent Wright delivered a 260 page novel without using the letter 'e' at any point. One of these books became a classic and the other merely an oddity, but the same animating dis - regard for the accepted rules is evident in both. Alain Robbe-Grillet can hardly be understood outside the context of this desire to trample on the norms of narrative fiction.
There have always been new novels, but he considered himself an exponent of the new novel. He employed the term—and explicitly aligned himself with the values of—the ' Noveau Roman,' a movement of creative spirits who, in Robbe-Grillet’s words, were 'seeking new forms for the novel, forms capable of expressing (or of creating) new relations between man and the world.' These writers were aware that 'the systematic repetition of the forms of the past is not only absurd and futile, but that it can even become harmful.' In this light, Robbe-Grillet almost took a sly pride in the negative critical response to The Voyeur, a novel that, in his words, met with a 'massive and violent rejection' from the press.
How many basic rules of narrative are violated in The Voyeur? Let’s start with the character Jean Robin, who we learn died years ago in chapter one. But then he is alive—with no explanation—in the next section of the book. Then again, his name is no longer Jean Robin; it is now Pierre. Meanwhile a young girl on the island where the novel takes place is murdered.
Or maybe she is not murdered, and has died in an accident. Her name is Jacqueline.
That is, except when her name is Violet. And the murderer is. The reader is forced into the role of detective here, and can’t count on the author (or narrator) for much help.
All the circumstantial evidence points to Mathias, the traveling salesman who is the main protagonist of The Voyeur, as the killer. Since the omniscient narrator allows us to eavesdrop on Mathias's thoughts, we can follow as the suspect tries to construct an alibi and explain the mounting evidence against him. But in a novel in which even the most tangible facts and situations can change after the fact, no one— protagonist, narrator, author—is entirely trustworthy. The very metaphysics of Robbe-Grillet's universe seem to run counter to the notion of 'guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.' It’s hard to give credence to any amount of evidence when even the basic facts can change from chapter to chapter, or even from sentence to sentence, when the past is open to constant revision, and the basic concepts of logic—self-identity, non-contradiction, the excluded middle—no longer hold.
Chronology is equally fluid here, with flashbacks intruding in such a predatory manner, frequently arriving unannounced in mid- paragraph, that the reader struggles to tell when memory or imagination substitute for direct observation. If this is truly the new novel, you may find yourself nostalgic for the old ones where hard facts don't change and dead characters won't come back to life without a good reason.
Robbe-Grillet adds to these various misleading feints by pretending to follow an almost geometrically precise description of reality, where subjectivity is replaced by disinterested analysis of sensory data. No one has done more than this author to try to reduce fiction to Euclidean description. Here is non atypical passage, where Robbe-Grillet is describing a lamp: It consists of two superimposed rings of equal tangent circles—rings, more exactly, since their centers are hollow—each ring of the upper series being exactly above a ring of the lower row to which it is joined for a fraction of an inch. The flame itself, produced from a circular wick, appears in the form of a triangle deeply scalloped at the apex, therefore exhibiting two points rather than just one. One of these is much higher t han the other, and sharper as well; the two joints are united by a concave curve—two asymmetrical, ascending branches on each side of a rounded depression. Did you get that?
Can’t you picture it in your head? No, this is not a question from the SAT, but an actual passage from The Voyeur. But don’t feel so bad, I can’t follow it either. Yet Robbe-Grillet believes that this type of description gets us 'beyond interpretation' and directly cognizant of the object in itself. The peculiarity here stems from the sharp contrast between the precise geometrical demonstrations of t he narrative and the fanciful unreality of the facts presented. Our author works hard to achieve a quasi-mathematical accuracy while also undermining it at every turn. In the truest sense of the term, this novel is self-cancelling at almost every juncture.
Other aspects of The Voyeur present a similar clash between precision and ambiguity. For example, our protagonist Mathias is a watch salesman, and literally runs his own life by the minute, or even the second. He calculates the average time per sales call, and constantly revises his forecast of the anticipated duration of every activity of his work day. This character trait figures prominently in the plot, which increasingly turns on Mathias's attempts to construct an itinerary for his actions that will prove his innocence.
In almost any other mystery novel, this would be a straightforward part of the plot. But in a story where nothing can be tabulated with confidence, an accounting of the minutes and seconds is strange window-dressing indeed. In the context of a novel by Robbe-Grillet, who plays fast-and-loose with the chronology and flashbacks of his narrative, we can only view this preoccupation with precise measurements of time as an ironic sidebar on the main event. In the final analysis, The Voyeur will probably frustrate more than engage you. The very novelties of this 'new' novel call too much attention to themselves, and will strike most readers as extrinsic to the story— forced on us to show off the avant-garde credentials of Mr. Robbe-Grillet rather than draw us into the story. Then again, that may be the inevitable result whenever an author prides himself on advancing the new novel before bothering to master the old one.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and pop culture. His latest book is Love Songs: The Hidden History, published by Oxford University Press. Publication date of this essay: August 23, 2011. 'The true writer has nothing to say,' Alain Robbe-Grillet once announced, in his characteristically enigmatic fashion. Yet this controversial author never took advantage of—in the parlance of the arresting officer—the right to remain silent. Still it took him many years before he found his vocation as a leader of an avant-garde literary movement. Robbe-Grillet first studied agricultural engineering, worked as a machinist in a compulsory labor program at a Nurem- berg tank factory during World War II, and later made a living as an agronomist.
He didn't publish novels until his thirties, when The Erasers (1951), followed up by The Voyeur (1953) and Jealousy (1957), announced the arrival of a provocative writer who irritated many readers with his disregard of the conventions of narrative fiction, but delighted influential critics such as Barthes and Blanchot for this very same reason. The essays collected in Robbe-Grillet's For a New Novel (1963) solidified this author’s reputation for lingering at the cutting edge, while his screenplay for the deliberately cryptic film Last Year at Marienbad (1961) proved that he could be even more iconoclastic in a cinematic setting and—perhaps equally surprising!—earn an Oscar nomination in the process. He later went on to direct his own films, none of them showing up at your local downtown megaplex or on TV during sweeps week. In truth, Robbe-Grillet paid a price for his ostentatious disregard of the rules other artists followed. His name eventually became emblematic of a certain prissy pretentiousness. When he is mentioned in the movie Sideways —the hapless Paul Giamatti character, describing his failed novel ('It evolves - or devolves - into a kind of a Robbe-Grillet mystery - but no real resolution'), the effect is to accentuate the character’s pretentiousness and irresolution. And that film did make it to your hometown mall movie screens and on to the shelves at Blockbuster.
Yet for others, Robbe-Grillet is remembered fondly as an author from an age in which certain grand expectations for change and novelty still adhered to literary fiction. This author may ultimately be remembered less for his body of work, and more for that glorification of rule-breaking, oddly enough both austere and expansive in his case, towards which he always aspired.