Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie : Realism and the Ethics of Reading

Abstract

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. One critic from the newspaper Le Monde believed that he had surely received a copy whose pages had been mixed up by the printer, that it was a jumbled mess (qtd. in Robbe-Grillet Order 3). La Jalousie , in many ways, can be said to illustrate Robbe-Grillet's modernist, if not postmodernist, bias against classical realism and narration,1 his view that tell[ing] a story has become strictly impossible [ raconter est devenu proprement impossible] (33). Making these remarks in an article aptly entitled On Several Obsolete Notions, published the same year as La Jalousie and republished a few years later in his influential 1963 manifesto For a New Novel , Robbe-Grillet made clear his intention to renovate both the novel form