Theory and Practice in the Works of Robbe-Grillet

Abstract

Robbe-Grillet's earliest ideas on fictional content, form, and technique appeared in book reviews and critical essays written for the NNRF and Critique in 1953-54, following the publication of his first novel, Les Gommes. As I have noted elsewhere, Robbe-Grillet at that time displayed a singular interest in novels and stories whose plots contained paradoxical reversals rebounding against their protagonists, such as Jean Duvignaud's Le Piege, the narrative of a beggar pursued for a crime that he has not committed, but only invented, yet which leads him to murder and death. The main point in the NNRF book reviews is almost always the ingenious structure of the plot, an emphasis that seemingly runs counter to later declarations by Robbe-Grillet (eagerly seized upon by critics and interpreters not only of Robbe-Grillet but of the whole alleged school of the nouveau roman, the ecole du regard, alitterature, and the anti-roman) to the effect that in modern fiction the plot becomes unimportant, assumes forms of pure convention, or disappears altogether. That the latter view hinges upon a definition of plot in the conventional or conditioned sense, and does not apply to formally structured action, is made evident not only by Robbe-Grillet's early admission of fascination with puzzlelike intrigue, but by the baroque plot of Les Gommes itself, the ambiguities of his later novels, and by the strict attention to the