Castles and Anti-Castles, or Kafka and Robbe-Grillet

Abstract

Robbe-Grillet is the foremost of many critics who allude to the influence of on their work. This would not, of itself, make the subject worth investigating. At least since 1940 has been in the French air, acting as a kind of objective compulsion, to the point where there is hardly a writer with modernist pretensions who would not acknowledge his influence, hardly a critic of these writers who would not play the cherchez Kafka game.1 Indeed, Kafka's impact on French literature seems to be deeper, more varied, and more enduring than on his native literature. Maja Goth had profuse material for a book-length study entitled et les lettres francaises as early as 1956, whereas there exists, to my knowledge, no full-scale investigation of and German letters. Miss Goth's book deals with two generations of progeny: the Surrealists and the Existentialists. The names of these movements sufficiently indicate the general trend of the naturalization process: to the Surrealists offered a model for fantastic literature, to the Existentialists a paradigm for the philosophy of the absurd. If in the Sartre-Camus generation resides largely in the eye of the beholder, it is because they regarded him as an existential philosopher who happened to write fiction, rather than as an artist whose vision encompassed, among other things, the existential problematic. According to Marthe Robert, the philosopher Merleau-Ponty refused to accredit Kafka's life-long admiration for one of the Existentialists' favorite betes noires, the unphilosophical pure novelist Flaubert.2 In the next literary generation this view was drastically reversed by RobbeGrillet, who persistently links both and the New Novel with Flaubert. His preface to the collection of critical essays, For a New Novel, ends with the following words: