Understanding Robbe-Grillet (review)

This comprehensive study of the French writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, labeled the chef de file of the “New novel,” makes a significant contribution to the series Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature, in which it appeared, very aptly, in the year 2000. For, Janus-like, Robbe-Grillet’s work is seen to look both forward and backward. A number of the ten novels and the short stories presented in detail, chapter by chapter, to the student of literature and analyzed for originality of narrative form, have already become classics of experimental twentieth-century fiction. These texts are studied within a culture where philosophy and the values of the mind have always been esteemed. They figure in the most recent anthologies as texts representing the narrative forms “of the future.”

The purpose of Roch Smith’s study is to facilitate the understanding of Robbe-Grillet’s complex, challenging, and often unyileding avant-garde writing, looking from his own turn of the century vantage point back over fifty years but also forward to new understandings of forms figuring the changes ongoing in the world around us. Smith’s detailed outline of each work and clear and chronological overview, including a chapter devoted to the recent autobiographical trilogy, which rethinks the non-natural conventions of life-writing, goes further in time and in depth than the earlier overview published in the similar “Twayne’s World-Author” series.

Smith follows Robbe-Grillet from his earliest theoretical writings through the writer’s meticulous explorations of a “neutral” objective world that turns out to be always perceived by a subject. He pursues the writer’s interest in the workings of language and social discourses that produce meanings, examines his experimentation with the relation between visual art and writing (Rauschenberg, Duchamp, Johns, Magritte), and finally interrogates the staging of violent sexual/textual fantasies in autofictions that re-collect and reinvent Robbe-Grillet’s own life and writing. The various chapters of Smith’s study trace Robbe-Grillet’s “regicide” seen as the assassination of the conventional modes of story-telling in A Regicide; the demonstration of the falsity of fiction emblematic of the non-natural forms that humankind leaves in its wake and the freedom to remake old forms (of Greek tragedy and detective fiction) in The Erasers; and the role of self-reflexivity in constituting a new fragmented, multiple, obsessive subject in search of its own conjoined heroism and criminality in Jealousy and the trilogy.

Despite the refusal of any pre-imposed and definitively-fixed meanings, and the forms of contingency, fragmentation, and absence espoused by a writer who claims to have “nothing to say,” Robbe-Grillet’s texts make an argument for the value of freedom. The self-professed criminal-investigator, lost in a labyrinth which no longer has a center (In the Labyrinth), the explorer in a temple of violent and erotic dreams, cannot be dissociated from the weaver of narrative forms. This weaver of fictional truths is at once caught in his own nets and emblematic of creative freedom. Smith’s empathetic reading endorses Robbe-Grillet’s own wager that the open forms this “last writer” has created will continue to have significance, at the least the significance of freedom, for the generations of readers beyond his era.