  Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar. TimeSearch This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available. |
|
Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) |
|
French author, literary theoretician, and representative of the nouveau roman. Alain Robbe-Grillet's work lack the conventional elements, such as dramatic plotting, coherent concept of time, and psychological analysis of the character. The novels are composed largely of recurring images, impersonally depicted physical objects and random events of everyday life. From his first published novel, Les Gommes (1953, The Erasers), Robbe-Grillet played with popular literary genres - several times with the traditional mystery novel, perhaps the most conventional literary form. The Erasers , which was based on the legend of Oedipus, mixes a detective story with changing perspectives and abundant descriptions of natural objects such as a tomato wedge. The book received the Fénélon Prize in 1954. "But you know there's no such thing as the perfect crime; we must look for the flaw that has to exist somewhere." Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in Brest, Finistère, in northwestern France, to a family of scientists and engineers. He attended the Lycée de Brest, and the Lyceés Buffon and St. Louis. During World War II he worked in a German tank factory. In 1944 he received a diploma from the National Institute of Agronomy. Between the years 1945 and 1949 he studied at the National Statistical Institute in Paris, and then in 1949-51 at the Institute of Colonial Fruits and Crops. Robbe-Grillet worked as an agronomist in Martinique, in the West Indies, where he supervised banana plantations, and from 1955 as a literary consultant at Les Editions de Minuit. The famous publishing house - under the direction of Jérôme Lindon (d. 2001) - also attracted such writers as Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu. Although these writers had their own distinctive voice, they all believed that the 19th-century social novel was dead. His first novel, A Régicide, Robbe-Grillet wrote while
working part-time in his sister's biology laboratory in 1949, but it
was not published until 1978. In 1951 he fell ill and wrote The
Erasers, which made him one of the leaders of the nouveau roman group.
It was followed by Le Voyeur (1955, The Voyeur), La Jalousie (1957,
Jealousy), which Nabokov called one of the greatest novels of the
century, and the Kafkaesque (1959, In the
Labyrinth). His statement of how he thought novels should be written
was published in Pour un Nouveau Roman (1963). "If in many of the
passages that follow, I readily employ the term New Novel, it is not to
designate a school, nor even a specific and constituted group of
writers working in the same direction; the expression is merely a
convenient label applicable to all those seeking new forms for the
novel, form capable of expressing (or of creating) new relations
between man and the world, to all those who have determined to invent
the novel, in other words, to invent man." Robbe-Grillet argued that the writer should content himself with the impersonal description of physical objects. Psychological or ideological analysis should be excluded - the reader must guess what hides under details and events. Robbe-Grillet's ideas had a crucial influence on the British born artist Martin Vaughn-James, whose visual novel, The Cage (1975), did not have human characters; their place had been taken by clothes and other objects. In fact, they are ghosts of post-World War II Britain. Despite its focus on objective reality cleansed of human feeling, Robbe-Grillet insisted, the nouveau roman is entirely subjective; its world is always perceived through the eyes of a character, not an omniscient narrator. "The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it," he once stated. In his essays For a New Novel (1963) Robbe-Grilled condemned the use of metaphors, because they anthropomorphize objects. This led to his attack on Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who, according to Robbe-Grillet, maintained 'a dubious relationship' with the world. "All my work is precisely engaged in the attempt to bring its own structures to light." Several of Robbe-Grillet's works, such as The Voyeur, are mysteries in which the reader is left to solve the puzzle without "authorized" explanation. The title of the work refers to Mathias, a traveling watch salesman, who watches his wife obsessively. He is perhaps is a rapist and a murderer, or his crimes are merely the products of his imagination. The book was awarded the Critics' Prize in 1955 but part of the jury thought that it was not a "novel" at all. Jealousy is among the most famous nouveaux romans from the 1950s. It is set on a banana plantation in the tropics, and it also takes a detective-story-like theme. A husband spies on his wife and her alleged lover Franck, their neighbor, through the openings of a Venetian blind (jalousie in French). The plot is minimal and the nonexistent role of the narrator is developed to the utmost limits. In Djinn (1981) Robbe-Grillet used another popular genre, the spy-story. The protagonist works for an androgynous American spy, and meets members of a secret society of latter-day Luddites dedicated to fighting the supremacy of the machine. The narrator is unsure of the external world; he is told that he is being dreamt, and after a while the story begins to fold back on itself. The bizarre logic crystallizes in an injured or perhaps dead child and remembers events that have not yet taken place. "My syllables fall, too, awakening neither response nor echo, like useless objects deprived of sense. And silence closes in again. Have I really spoken? Cold, numbness, paralysis begin to spread through my limbs." La Maison de rendez-vous
(1965), a parody of James Bond adventures, used several points of view,
which contradicted each other. The story, focusing on a evening get
together, folds back on itself various times. The apocalyptic Projet pour une révolution à New York
(1970, Project for a Revolution in New York ) was written as if it were
a film or the journal of a director. Some reviewers noted that there is
no revolution in the novel, despite its title, failing to recognize its
allusions to underground activists. "Right or wrong New York represents
a place where, more than anywhere, nothing is natural any more,"
Robbe-Grillet said after the publication of the work, "where everything
is constantly transformed into myth." La Belle Captive (1975) was based on the myth of the beautiful captive, and took its themes from the paintings of the French surrealist René Magritte. Snapshots (1962) included an artistic homage to the painter Gustave Moreau (1826-98) in the story 'The Secret Room'. Its coldly narrated erotic scene with a chained woman is filled with sexual violence - a trait which is typical of Robbe-Grillet's later works. "The man is till standing about yard away, half leaning over her. He looks at her face, seen upside down, her dark eyes made larger by their surrounding eye-shadow, her mouth wide open as if screaming. The man's posture allows his face to be seen only in a vague profile, but one senses in it a violent exaltation, despite the rigid attitude, the silence, the immobility." (from 'The Secret Room') Le miroir qui revient (1984) was the first volume of an autobiographical trilogy, Romanesques. In his later works Robbe-Grillet acknowledged Claude Simon's dictum that "Everything is autobiographical, even the imaginary". According to Robbe-Grillet, life is not overtly meaningful or absurd, it is rather simple. The theme of the labyrinth links Robbe-Grillet to Borges; they both share the same fascination for interpretations inside interpretations. Labyrinths are also the terrain of spy fiction, and in La Reprise (2001) a spy is sent to post-war Berlin on a mission which becomes for him a sado-erotic experience. "All my novels are comic. Perhaps La Reprise more so", Robbe-Griller once said of his best-selling book. Robbe-Grillet's emphasis on the visual world led him in the
1960s to writing scenarios and directing films. Some of his novels have
also been called ciné-romans (film-novels). These works have
challenged the limits of expected narrative structures and conventional
realism. Robbe-Grillet's thesis is that the physical world is the only
true reality, and the only way to approach memory is through physical
objects. The most famous dramatization of his literary theories is Alan
Resnais's film Last Year at Marienbad,
for which he wrote the
screenplay with a knowlege of Resnais's favorite tracking shots. Sacha
Vierny's task as a lightning cameraman was to realize the atmosphere of
a "sealed, stifling world," as Robbe-Grillet describet it, "... a
universe of marble and stucco, columns, mouldings, gilded ceilings,
statues, motionless servants ...." Vierny began in 1985 a series of
films with the British director Peter Greenaway, much influenced by Marienbad. (Making Pictures: A Century of European
Cinematography, 2003, pp. 264-267) The puzzle without solution presents a luxurious country house in which a stranger (Giorgio Albertazzi) meets a woman (Delphine Seyring), who may or may not have had an affair with him the previous year, perhaps in Marienbad, or somewhere else. The viewer never learns whether the meeting took place. The perfectly sculptured silent gardens, stately camera-work, and detached performances create a dreamlike atmosphere; the tiny humans in the landscape cast shadows while the manicured bushes do not. Are the persons the only "real" figures in the story? Robbe-Grillet's other early films include Trans-Europ-Express (1966), which circulated elements from Hitchcock films and gangster movies. L'Éden et aprés (1971) started his color trilogy. In Topology of a Phantom City (1976) Robbe-Grillet used freeze-frame technique which he then set in motion. A French policeman investigates the death of a prostitute. David is the perpetrator of the murder or murders that have taken place. Sometimes David writes in first person. "I am alone. Walking at random. Wandering, as if at random, among the unrecognizable fragments of what were palatial homes, public buildings, private residences, gaming houses and houses of prostitution, theatres, temples, and fountains. I am looking for something." Robbe-Grillet was elected member of the prestigious Academie Francaise in 2004. He died on 18 February, 2008, at the age of 85. For further reading: Intersexual rivalry: a "reading in pairs" of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet ed. by Julia Waters, Peter Collier (2000); Understanding Alain Robbe-Grillet by Roch Charles Smith (2000); Inventing the Real World by Marjorie H. Hellerstein (1998); Women in Robbe-Grillet by Lillian Dunmars (1994); Robbe-Grillet and the Fantastic by Virginia Harger-Grinling, Tony Chadwick, eds. (1994); Robbe-Grillet and Modernity by Raylene L. Ramsay (1992); The Erotic Dream Machine by Anthony N.Fragola and Roch Charles Smith (1992); Duplications et duplicité dans les 'Romanesques' d'Alain Robbe-Grillet by Roger-Michel Allemand (1991); Alain Robbe-Grillet by Ben Stoltzfus (1987, paperback); Alain Robbe-Grillet by Ilona Leki (1983); Alain Robbe-Grillet, l'éstange by Jean-Claude Vareille (1981); Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet by Roy Armes (1981); Robbe-Grillet, ed. by François Jost (1978, in Obliques 16-17); Robbe-Grillet by Jean Ricardou (1976); Les Romans de Robbe-Grillet by Bruce Morrisette (1975); Pour une théorie du un nouveau roman by Jean Ricardou (1971); Alain Robbe-Grillet and the New French Novel by Ben Stoltzfus (1964) - The theoretical premises of the Nouveau roman were collected in Robbe-Grillet's Pour un nouveau roman (1963). See also Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, and Nathalie Sarraute. The wave of experimentalism has been important mainly in France, but also Kafka, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Pirandello, and James Joyce among others have paved way for the literary movement. Later echoes of the anti-novel has been seen in the works of Uwe Johnson in Germany, Susan Sontag in America, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Rayner Heppenstall in England. Selected works:
|
