Alain Robbe-Grillet Research Articles

Living Arrangements: Mise-en-scène and the Nouveau Roman in the Fiction of Ann Quin

Abstract Why is postwar experimental fiction so concerned with measuring and marking out scene and setting? This article analyzes the fiction of the avant-garde British novelist Ann Quin, both her short stories and her debut novel Berg, focusing on her mise-en-scène, choreography, and tableaux. It argues for a fraught relationship between twentieth-century fiction and setting, from Henry James’s “house of fiction” and Woolf’s denunciation of naturalist interiors, from the self-sufficient psyches of early modernism to the fastidious mapping of scene and place in the theory of the nouveau roman, especially that of Natalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The importance of Quin’s work for postwar fiction, the article argues, is that it suspends, periodically, the free indirect style of early modernism but also departs from the austere topography of the nouveau roman, so that her fiction furnishes an elastic, anxious, and unstable mise-en-scène.

Жорж Перек и «новый роман»: поля пересечений и расхождений с творчеством Алена Роб-Грийе

The article examines intertextual links between the works of the French writers Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Not only early texts by Perec but also further ones in form and content refer to the artistic discoveries and inventions of the representatives of Nouveau Roman. In the modern history of French literature, Perec usually appears as an antipode of the Nouveau Roman approach to writing; nevertheless, it is relevant to see and analyze the places of these discrepancies to understand better the specifics and creativity of Perec and the characteristics of the representatives of the Nouveau Roman. The study focuses on early texts (Les Choses, Un homme qui dort), which reveal direct links with the poetics of the nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet in particular, and on later ones (La Disparition). The article concludes with the significance of the typological links between Nouveau Roman and Perec’s early work, as well as their significant dissimilarity, which consists of subsequent authorial aspirations and attitudes towards style and writing ideas.

Alain Robbe-Grillet and the modernist resignification of catharsis

Resumen En un pasaje de Projet pour une révolution à New York de Alain Robbe-Grillet uno de los personajes enuncia un programa revolucionario que tiene como objetivo « d'opérer une catharsis générale des désirs inavoués de la société contemporaine”. A priori el concepto de “catarsis” supone un giro foráneo a la retórica modernista de Robbe-Grillet, sin embargo dicha mención reaparece en varios ensayos de los años setenta cuando el autor busca precisar un tipo particular de experiencia estética. El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo por lo tanto analizar el concepto de catarsis de Robbe-Grillet a los fines de, no sólo desentrañar el proyecto estético-político de dicha novela, sino a su vez repensar la relación entre teoría y praxis, entre liberación de energía y efecto moral, entre educación estética e intensificación del placer que se deriva de sus textos.

Dirty Windows and Troublesome Things: The Problem of Object-Orientation in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie

This article investigates the representation of objects in La Jalousie (1957), a novel in the nouveau roman tradition written by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the ‘new novel’ sought to render the material world with objective clarity, and positioned itself against traditional fiction, with its reliance on metaphor, allegory, and other ‘projections,’ this article argues that such an aesthetic program is undercut by its own assumptions about the power of description and the primacy of the visual. In an analysis which hybridizes three separate strands of criticism—object-oriented ontology, Heideggerian phenomenology, and the models of ‘resonation’ proposed by Brian Massumi—I will argue that such a treatment of objects, with its exclusive reliance on visual description, measurement, and enumeration, ends up depriving objects of the vitality and dynamism that would justify such a fictional project in the first place. However, traces of this dynamism do survive the flattening sweep of Robbe-Grillet’s narration, and indeed offer from the cracks and fissures of the novel’s otherwise smoothly controlled style the possibility of an alternate ‘object-orientation’—one, I will argue, which suspends its cool optical detachment to allow, however briefly, the eruption of a messy, entangling register of touch.

Leonardo Reviews Online

February 01 2023 Leonardo Reviews Online Author and Article Information Online Issn: 1530-9282 Print Issn: 0024-094X ©2023 ISAST2023ISAST Leonardo (2023) 56 (1): 117. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02335 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Leonardo Reviews Online. Leonardo 2023; 56 (1): 117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02335 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsLeonardo Search Advanced Search Alain Robbe-Grillet: L’Aventure du Nouveau Roman by Benoît Peeters. Reviewed by Jan Baetens. Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide, edited by Joanna Ebenstein. Reviewed by Robert Maddox-Harle. ’Pataphysics Unrolled, edited by Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor. Reviewed by Brian Reffin Smith. The Creative Lives of Animals by Carol Gigliotti. Reviewed by Gregory F. Tague. Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, edited by Barbara Penner et al. Reviewed by Michael Punt. Modern Alchemy by Emmanuele Coccia (text) and Viviane Sassen (photographs). Reviewed by Jan Baetens. You do not currently have access to this content.

Le lexique somatique dans le roman d’Alain Robbe-Grillet « Dans le labyrinthe » (interprétation linguistique et phénoménologique)

This study is a theoretical and practical assessment of corporeality and its characteristics. The article presents corporeality and somatic vocabulary through the prism of phenomenology as well as their linguistic and stylistic representation in the text. Corporeality is a phenomenological category based on the notion of the “corps sensible.” Its four characteristics are: constancy, reversibility, affectivity and kinesthesis. The study analyses peculiarities of these four characteristics and pays close attention to the phenomenon of kinesthesis. We considered this philosophical concept in the novel Dans le labyrinthe by Alain Robbe-Grillet, representative of the New Novel, who was notably influenced by phenomenology. The analysis of this novel has shown a body of somatic lexicon as one of the linguistic means of representing corporeality. The study has also analyzed the textual realization of the four characteristics of corporeality.

A Story with Characters and Action

A Story with Characters and Action

Лингвопрагматические особенности современного художественного нарратива на материале рассказа “Scène” А. Роба-Грийе

The study aims to identify the changes that have occurred in the literary narrative driven by the postmodern era. The paper explores the notion of “the narrative”, the classical approach to its definition, determines the specificity of the literary narrative, provides a scheme of its construction. The study is novel in that it identifies the pragmatic potential of the impact that the new type of the literary narrative with a number of specific features has on the reader in connection with a new concept of perception and construction of the text developed under the influence of postmodern and cinema theorists. As a result of the study conducted using the work “Scène” by the classic and “new type of writing” creator Alain Robbe-Grillet as an example, such pragmatic features of the modern literary narrative as the cinematic nature, openness of the text, the author’s cooperation with the reader are demonstrated at the linguistic level.

"A dream, dictating its own course": On Ralph Gibson’s Photobook Trilogy, 1970–1974

This paper scrutinizes American photographer Ralph Gibson’s photobook trilogy published by his own company Lustrum Press: The Somnambulist (1970), Déjà-vu (1973), and Days at Sea (1974). The success of the trilogy verified a sizable market for highly personal photobooks, which would become a defining trend in contemporary art photography. Focusing on the structure of visual signification in each volume, the paper performs for the first time a close analysis of Gibson’s sequencing method materialized in the book form. The inner logic of each publication is further elucidated in relation to the major sources of reference in 20th-century art, photography, and literature, such as the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, the cloud photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, and the Nouveau Roman of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The paper argues that sequencing was an epistemological strategy for Gibson to prioritize arbitrary relations between two neighboring pictures, without impairing each photograph’s truth claim to the perceptible reality. This was the photographer’s tactic to reconcile the purported objectivity of the camera image and the subjective propensity for narrative and imagination in his photobooks. Gibson’s avoidance of heavy-handed manipulation and shocking subject matter led his work to the “surrealism of the perception,” which can be situated in the tradition of Surrealist photography advocated by André Bazin and Brassaï.

Reality Bites

Reality Bites

‘It is, that’s all.’: J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and the cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet

ABSTRACT The notebooks that accompany J. M. Coetzee’s early drafts of The Life & Times of Michael K (1983) reveal the importance of cinematic modes of representation for Coetzee’s conception of the eponymous Michael K. With reference to early drafts of the novel, this paper argues that Michael K’s characterisation is particularly influenced by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s filmmaking practices. Specifically, this article illustrates the importance of Robbe-Grillet’s treatment of subjectivity and objectivity for Coetzee’s experimentation with modernist modes of writing. Coetzee’s experiments with cinematic form during the drafting process illustrate the ways in which he navigates his fidelity to modernism’s formalist values in relation to the political and literary concerns that encircle him as an author in apartheid-era South Africa. By analysing the implicit and explicit influence of Robbe-Grillet’s aesthetic values as a filmmaker on Coetzee’s writing, this article illustrates the importance of acknowledging cinematic modes of representation in Coetzee’s fidelity to the nouveau roman, and his continuing investigation of modernism during this era.

The Presencing Tendency: French and American Avant-Garde Strategiesunder the Formal Subsumption of Art

Whether what we call the avant-garde in literature ended sometime in the last century or, conversely, persists to this day is an open question. But rather than coming down on one side or another of the issue, this essay concerns itself with what the avant-garde looks like when, in Bourdieusian terms, it feels its very position to be at stake in the field’s struggle for domination, both internally and externally, with the field of power. Either by historical coincidence or, more intriguingly, by something as nefarious as influence, both the French and the American avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s witnessed the development of a similar aesthetic tendency in response to encroachments upon the restricted production of their respective literary fields by external forces. This tendency, which I call a “poetics of presence,” is a gambit for textual immediacy—what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht terms “presence effects,” as opposed to “meaning effects.” Through readings of theoretical works by Alain Robbe-Grillet, on the one hand, and poems by Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, on the other, I demonstrate the character of the poetics of presence in the French and American contexts, concluding ultimately that in both cases such strategies function to preserve a formal subsumption of artistic labor under conditions of restricted production, as against the threading incursions of the real subsumption of that labor to which external forces—capital, politics—would subject it.

Theory of Mind and Experimental Autobiography: Alain Robbe-Grillet and Assia Djebar

This paper argues that experimental autobiographies can help readers take the perspectives of others when the practice of theorizing other minds become, at best, tired, and at worst, dehumanizing. The essay studies two experimental texts: one that eschews the traditional means of communicating psychological character development in order to explore the world outside the human (Alain Robbe-Grillet's Le Miroir qui revient), and another that deliberately invests in the representation of marginalized persons as an ethical imperative (Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia). This confluence suggests that perspective is an unalienable aspect of human subjectivity, in literature as in life.

The spatialized narratives in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “The secret room” and Wang Anyi’s “The public kitchen”

Whereas Lessing distinguishes painting as a spatial art from poetry as a temporal art, Joseph Frank proposes the increased spatiality in modern poetry and novel, which feature the juxtaposition of images, the fragmented narrative, and the suspended meaning-construction until the entirety is perceived. Although excluded from Frank’s study, modern short story also exemplifies the spatial form to a remarkable degree. Through a comparative reading of French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “The secret room” and Chinese writer Wang Anyi’s “The public kitchen,” this article explores the different means and degrees of spatiality in these two short stories. In contrast with the obliteration of time elements in Robbe-Grillet’s story, time itself is spatialized in Wang’s story, and the space becomes an embodiment of the passing of time. It is then argued that, the time-inherent narrative reveals modern Chinese short story’s “modified correspondence” with its Western counterpart, which can be attributed to the paradoxical yearning for a sense of historical continuity in the path of China’s modernization.

Metamorphoses of Oedipus in Modern French Literature. From an Intellectual Drama to a Psychoanalytical Reflection on Ideal Love

Oedipus Rex, a tragedy created twenty-five centuries ago, is still a source of inspiration for many writers. However, the overall message of modern interpretations of the Oedipus myth differs considerably from the message of Sophocles’ play; these works are no longer the stories of a man punished by gods for his haughtiness (hybris). André Gide modernizes Sophocles’ tragedy, transforming it into a lesson in secular humanism. The play by Jean Cocteau focuses on the transition from ignorance to awareness. Alain Robbe-Grillet creates an anti-story about the contemporary version of Oedipus, whose lot is determined, not by gods, but by chance and unconscious desires. As for the psychoanalytical interpretation of the myth by Jacqueline Harpman, it is first of all the reflection on ideal love, fully realized in an incestuous relationship between the son and his mother.

Sperimentalismo e dissenso: l’ engagement neoavanguardistico del nouveau roman

The use of the definition «nouveau roman» closely links to the activity of the French neo-avantgardist group of the ecole du regard. The group’s members draw their inspiration from a critical reflection on literature and its meaning, in opposition to tradition. The idea, which reunites as different writers as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, is the reliance on the novel as a form of critical elaboration of reality. The main objects of this collective experimentation are in the forms and the structures of the novel.The present article focuses on the issue of the engagement as presented in Robbe-Grillet and Butor’s essays: the result of a retrospective consideration on their novels, combined to their ideas about literature and its possibilities, whose outcome is the opposition to «sclerotized» structures of traditional realism.

Robbe-Grillet in America: TheNouveau RomanMeets the Language Textbook

How could American students of intermediate French be the catalysts for a work of avant-garde French literature? This article centers onLe rendez-vous, an intermediate French-language textbook that combined a novel written by the French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet with grammatical exercises written by Yvone Lenard, a prominent textbook author and instructor of French in the United States. Focusing on previously unexamined archives of this publication, from its release in America to the publication of Robbe-Grillet's novel in France under the titleDjinn, the essay reveals an unknown literary history of transnational collaboration and exchange and places new emphasis on Robbe-Grillet's formative involvement with American higher education during his literary career. Through close reading of manuscript drafts and publishers' papers, the essay demonstrates how the dynamics of global publishing and shifting trends in language pedagogy aligned to condition the production of what would become Robbe-Grillet's most commercially successful novel.

Imagination and reality

To Wallace Stevens the artist is determined by his relation to the "pressure of reality." When the artist erases or evades the pressure reality is absorbed by the imagination so that the interdependence between reality and imagination is aesthetically metamorphosed by a process of abstraction, and the artist's power is measured by his ability to abstract himself and to withdraw reality with him into his abstraction. Here, Stevens has formulated nothing less than a poetics of abstraction. In this essay the significance of his poetics will be examined by applying it to modernist fiction, embarking from a reading by Stevens' own poem "The Snow Man” (1921), where the aural sense, listening, prevents and excludes a fanciful attachment to the unreal and allows for the interdependence and the merging of imagination and reality, a poetic abstraction that is embedded in nature itself. In Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel Jealousy (1957), Haruki Murakami's short story "TV People” (1993), and Paul Auster's novel 4321 (2017) we find a problematising, even a denigration of vision as the characters are drawn to petrified images that obviate perception and insight. Bruno Schulz' novella "Cinnamon Shops” (1934) forms an exception in that the experience of illumination and expansion, taking place in winter, is precipitated by a unifying of the senses, aural, visual and tactile. The first-person narrator abstracts himself and abstracts reality by placing it in the imagination, to use Stevens' phrase.

TIME AND ITS INDETERMINACY IN ROMAN INGARDEN’S CONCEPT OF THE LITERARY WORK OF ART

The time of the literary work of art is a schematized aspect of the represented objectivities of the literary work. Roman Ingarden’s analysis of the time of the literary work extends upon Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness but nevertheless remains consistent with it, insofar as within a literary work as well as actuality, an objective time or literary objective time is constituted from an experience of temporal objects (or in the case of the work of art, represented objectivities). The time of the literary work of art is experienced through its represented objectivities and depends on an already existent concept of objective time. (We conceive of the time of the literary work of art as a variant of actual time.) The time of the literary work, however, gains an indeterminacy, as the author of the literary work is able to manipulate our experience of time within the literary work by predicting how the reader will concretize its events, characters, and objects with respect to time. I use Alain Robbe-Grillet’s representation of the centipede in La Jalousie as an example of the possible manipulations of time, explicable through Ingarden’s analysis of time in the literary work of art.

Chandani LokugéMy Van Gogh

Blue. When Kvist encounters a tramp named Hermann Gobb-Rillen, who had authored a novel entitled The Erasers, it becomes clear that Alain Robbe-Grillet is one of those ghosts, too, and that he has in a sense furnished a map for Kvist’s wanderings. In short, if Martiny is patently concerned with incendiary politics and natural cataclysm , he is also interested in how the human mind comes to terms with those phenomena , whose dimensions beggar the imagination , and it is that feature of his novel which seems especially opportune right now. Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Chandani Lokugé My Van Gogh Melbourne. Arden. 2019. 161 pages. CHANDANI LOKUGÉ’s new novel, My Van Gogh, winds its way from Australia to France with the lilt of an ancient pilgrim song. The novel, which traces the journey of a young Australian man, Shannon, to France in search of his lost mother’s roots, is rich in sensual detail and recounted with highly evocative, poetic storytelling. An erstwhile art student, Shannon is on a quest to walk in the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh, who mirrors Shannon’s desperate need to come to terms with his own struggle with chronic depression and, in so doing, to arrive at a capacity for healing the lifelong wound of rejection and abandonment caused by his mother’s sudden and unexplained departure. The novel reads like a somewhat melancholy revisioning of the medieval pilgrim’s morality tales, where several characters interact and share their stories and histories over the course of a pilgrimage; these interactions create a relational foundation on which new lives, and new directions, can be built and explored. This conceit, applied to a more contemporary context, allows Lokugé to explore what is fast emerging as one of the most significant issues of the postmillenial generations, that of mental health, as growing numbers of youth find themselves fundamentally alienated and unable to form thriving relationships among peers or family. The novel is also a testament to the capacity of the creative genius to shape chaos into healing form. Shannon finds direction and succor through his sketches and poems, while his companion, Lilou, finds ways to balance the darkness of her traumatic past, which she paints into watercolors of wounded seagulls against the soaring music of Ralph Vaughan William’s “The Lark Ascending.” With her unflinchingly human portrayal of loss and recuperation , Lokugé’s characters show us the capacity of the human psyche to explore trauma through art and to renew itself, like the pilgrimage heals through walking, in the process of containing the sublime within the beautiful. Aparna Halpé Toronto, Canada Matéi Visniec Mr. K Released Trans. Jozefina Komporaly. London. Seagull Books. 2020. 273 pages. THE PREMISE OF MR. K RELEASED, written in prerevolutionary, self-imposed exile and published twenty years postfactum , is simple: condemned to prison for an unspecified crime, Kosef J is unable to understand why he is being released or what to do with his liberty. As the protagonist’s name points to that of Kafka’s central character in The Trial, Visniec owns this heritage and evidently writes in a tradition of “freedom” (or “prison”) literature, just as Kafka himself called Dostoevsky “a blood relative.” Essentially, the book is a reinterpretation or “negative” of Kafka’s novella. This information is elaborated upon in the author’s original preface, not included in this English text, though the autobiographical dimension of the author not being able to adapt to Western freedom gives the book a more interesting dimension. Such parentage sets the tone for a philosophical novel, driven by the protagonist’s sense of cognitive dissonance, and succeeds in doing so honorably. Visniec capitalizes on Kafka’s dramatic flair. Though Mr. K Released is one of his several novels, the RomanianFrench writer is also a poet and most prolifically a playwright, and this shows. Farcical dialogue and cinematic jumps recall the dreamlike irony of a Fellini film, where, indeed, a single male protagonist always finds himself psychologically trapped. The corporeality and fast pace account for its reading like stage direction, and the prose is deliberately expository in the manner of a script. Characters are simple but candid, building strata of...