Alain Robbe-Grillet Research Articles

Overcoming a Tainted Past

Abstract Over the years, the list of intellectuals who collaborated with the Nazis and their allies has gotten longer. Celebrated philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, celebrated novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet and, more recently, Günter Grass have been placed on that list. The latter two authors put themselves on that list by publishing their memoirs.1 The nature of the misdeeds during the Nazi era ranged from carrying a Nazi party card and giving pro-Nazi lectures (Heidegger), to working in an armament factory in Nazi Germany (Robbe-Grillet), to joining the SS elite corps (Grass), to contributing tendentious articles in the…

Women, Trauma, and Late Modernity: Sontag, Duras, and Silence in Cinema, 1960–1980

Women, Trauma, and Late Modernity:Sontag, Duras, and Silence in Cinema, 1960–1980 E. Ann Kaplan (bio) Absolute Subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort of silence (Shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida My interest in late modernism has to do with it being the end of an era that, especially in post–World War II Europe, spawned a generation of artists reflecting a new sensibility touched by trauma—as experienced through devastating events such as the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and colonialism. The deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman in 2007 and that of Alain Robbe-Grillet in February 2008 ( Jacques Rivette marked his eightieth birthday at the same time) underscore the passing of a late modernist generation that greatly influenced Susan Sontag and to which Marguerite Duras belonged. Since her death, Sontag has gained a focus and attention from leading women critics and academics hitherto lacking (and I include myself here). If Sontag was not a particularly easy person, she did not deserve the memoir (touched by envy) that Terry Castle wrote in 2005, nor did she deserve the well-known critique by Susan Wiseman that was, I argue, mistaken.1 In general there is now a renewed interest in understanding Sontag's life and work—this especially in light of her last years when she lived with Annie Leibovitz, and of Leibovitz's extraordinary photos of Sontag dying. I want to bring attention to Sontag's little-known 1970s films, and to situate her in her sociocultural context as a case study along with Duras. The two women, now dead, represent a particular historical 1970s feminist moment in regard to women in film and to a particular set of differing interests relating to silence and its aesthetics (still relevant today), both of which warrant study. Both [End Page 158] women were writers and filmmakers and both share Sontag's notion (as illuminated, among other ideas, in her long essay, "The Aesthetics of Silence") that "modern art . . . transmits in full the alienation produced by historical consciousness." Where traditional art, Sontag notes, invites a look, "art that is silent engenders a stare."2 My focus here is this very silence, used as a strategy by these two artists (Duras from France, Sontag from the United States, and each aware of the other), to achieve specific ends and specific responses relevant to late modernism. Their confluence and their juxtaposition in this period reveal provocative aspects of their work not necessarily otherwise visible. The contrast also reminds us of what we too readily forget, namely that on the cusp of the woman's movement, different theorizations of woman in patriarchy prevailed on each side of the Atlantic due to the contrasting intellectual traditions and methods of analysis in the United States and France. I choose the issues relating to an aesthetics of silence because silence, along with anti-narrative strategies, was a pervasive trope in late modernism, as can be seen in artists like Samuel Beckett, Antonioni, and Bergman, to name only the most obvious. However, both Duras and Sontag utilize this aesthetic in ways different from their male peers—ways that reveal their concerns specifically as women in patriarchal society. If my glance back to the 1970s has a nostalgic tinge to it, so be it. In a sense this essay is dedicated to remembering what we have lost in the deaths of two female pioneers. It also aims to resituate aspects of their art through the contemporary lens of "affect" and trauma theory. Duras used silence as an element of darkness and saw darkness as an inevitable metaphor for women. Her conception of the darkness from which women wrote was related to a position that saw signs of society's death everywhere. Women's way of writing, she argued, exploded the terrifying emptiness and illusion of bourgeois consciousness and male language. As Xavière Gauthier puts it, Duras's books "do the work of mining; they mine from below."3 For the Duras of this period (she later abandoned her somewhat utopian position), silence and passivity were the only ways in which women could be themselves. She did not...

Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions in Holocaust Literature within the American Context

Michael McKeon states, in his introduction to anthology Theory of Novel: A Historical Approach^ that genre is a problem solving model on level of (1). One is tempted to consider each work as an isolated case, 'traiť in search of ^ype' (4). This approach suits novel as form encompassing extremely heterogeneous matter. After production and consumption what remains is, as Alain Robbe-Grillet declares, the perceived object, partial and provisional signification (McKeon 804). Both writer and reader accede to reality via betraying slippery words. The language they put together, writing and reading, is loaded with personal cultural memory. When reality represented in novelistic matrix is as traumatic and uncanny as Holocaust, then genre has to get adjusted to sinuous, tricky psyche remembering and attempting to communicate. Trauma blocks for long while capacity to reminisce and express. One tells catastrophic story abiding by rules of affected brain and soul of witness, participant, or perpetrator. In case of indirect renditions of history, extent and depth of documentation stand trial, as much as capacity to reconstruct it via imagination. Access to Shoah2 may be denied by tragically incommensurable event, but lack of empiric experience may help. One classical example is offered by midrash of Lamentations by Rabbi Judah Prince and Rabbi Yohanan. The first one, although compiler of Mishnah and pre-eminent sage of period was bested by R. Yohanan, his disciple, and one of Amorites, rabbis who succeeded sages of Mishnah and whose authority was considered secondary. The paradox is resolved by indicating distance in time of each from destruction of Temple. Rabbi J. P. lived in second half of second century and beginning of third, and though not an eye witness to horrible consequences of Bar Kochba wars of 132-35, he was close enough to hear accounts of witnesses

The Absence of the Establishing Shot in Slovak Films of the 1960s

This article asks why several Czech and Slovak directors of the 1960s employed what might be referred to as a non-establishing-shot technique. To state that the employment of this technique was a reaction to Socialist Realism and to a Socialist society leaves unanswered the question of ‘how’ this reaction against the collectivization of the characters and the stories carried out under the aesthetics of Socialist Realism was expressed. More significantly, it was a reaction against the forced collectivization of society under the Communist regime. The absence of the establishing shot was a means of returning individuality, uniqueness and differences to characters. It was a way of stating that a society is formed by the sum of its parts, that is, its individual members. This article deals mainly with the Slovak side of the New Wave, hitherto neglected by western scholars. It asks why and how five directors (Stefan Uher, Peter Solan, Juraj Jakubisko, Dušan Hanák and Alain Robbe-Grillet) made use of the non-establishing-shot technique; how they developed the technique; and in what ways they used it in a different manner to their Czech counterparts.

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

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

The Target (review)

Reviewed by: The Target Lynn A. Higgins Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jasper Johns, The Target, Translated and with an essay by Ben Stoltzfus. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006, 115 pp. A painting by Jasper Johns of a bulls-eye, aptly if unimaginatively entitled “The Target,” appears on the dust jacket of a book with the same title. The book contains eight color plates of paintings exhibited in a 1978 Johns show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, accompanied by a short fictional narrative written for the exhibit catalogue by New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. That narrative, entitled “La Cible,” is translated here as “The Target.” Robbe-Grillet’s text was unorthodox, to say the least: “La Cible” no more “introduced” the exhibit than Johns’s paintings “illustrated” the text. Rather, Robbe-Grillet used the paintings as jumping off points or “generators” for his own inventions, which he also incorporated into a full-length novel, Souvenirs du triangle d’or.1 In The Target, as in the original catalogue, neither the paintings nor the fiction is subordinated, nor are the two simply juxtaposed. Instead, verbal and visual texts are placed into dialogue, which is what makes this volume particularly useful to comparatists. This virtual conversation between Robbe-Grillet and Johns is not comparative in any traditional or obvious sense, but fortunately, the discussion has a wise and informed moderator. Already the author of several studies of Robbe-Grillet and here at once translator, editor, and exegete, Ben Stoltzfus mobilizes an impressive array of critical approaches to unpack the many-layered connections between Johns’s paintings and Robbe-Grillet’s text. In his “Jasper Johns and Alain Robbe-Grillet: An Interarts Essay,” Stoltzfus traces Robbe-Grillet’s creative genealogy through Pop [End Page 213] Art to the Surrealists and beyond. He also selected fifty additional black-and-white reproductions of Johns’s works for inclusion in the volume to accompany his essay. The Target can profitably be read as a companion volume to La Belle Captive (1975), a novel in which Robbe-Grillet was similarly inspired by a series of paintings by René Magritte. In that case too, Stoltzfus provided both translation and enlightenment in the form of another critical study, “The Elusive Heroine: An Interarts Essay.”2 Stoltzfus uses linguistic and semiotic analysis to argue that Robbe-Grillet’s text and Johns’s paintings approach their respective media in analogous ways. Highly ironic and self-reflexive, both artists work in a meta-artistic frame to draw attention away from mimesis in order instead to engage the reader/viewer in the process of creating meaning. Both are aware (to cite a formula from Robbe-Grillet’s fellow New Novelist Jean Ricardou) that creation is not only the story of an adventure but also and simultaneously the adventure of a story. That story emerges from reorganization of familiar material into new configurations, a process (an adventure) that Stoltzfus elucidates with the help of psychoanalysis and chaos theory. Special attention is given to the notion of “strange attractors,” which resemble unconscious or hidden generators of images and text. Stoltzfus identifies core motifs that Robbe-Grillet adapts from Johns, and he traces both artists’ focus on objects such as targets and cells in all their various manifestations, including psychic processes and organic forms. By manipulating these and other motifs, the two artists activate and recycle cultural myths, bringing them to the surface of consciousness. Finally, Stoltzfus argues compellingly for the political implications and even the overt revolutionary potential of Johns’s and Robbe-Grillet’s experimental artistic production. By breaking the rules of realistic representation and radically reordering received realities, he maintains, the two artists demonstrate the malleability of the world and our power to transform it. In showing “that it is possible to deviate from a culture’s prescribed order” (76) art has the capacity to “dislocate the codes” (93) and to “alter our habits and expectations” (97). It can challenge consumer culture, for example, by engaging the reader/viewer’s active participation and thus showing that the point of art is “not to consume meaning, but to produce it” (79). Stoltzfus bravely takes on Robbe-Grillet’s notorious misogyny and asks...

Le primat de la description dans la phénoménologie et le Nouveau Roman

The point shared by phenomenology and the French Nouveau Roman is that they both confer great importance to description. But is it philosophically interesting to compare the works of authors like Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon (which relate to details in the material world) with the works of Husserl (whose object is the eidos)? In this article, we first study in what way the method suggested by Husserl was innovative and in what way it influenced his examples and style in the Ideen. We then examine how the fact that this operation no longer relates to beings could be construed as progress in relation to Heidegger. Finally, we study the reasons why this mode of speech was favoured in the novels of the 1960s. Our assumption, as the later writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty show, is that this literary movement tried to achieve in the field of fiction the same breakthrough and to give description a scientific quality.

“Outside, it is Snowing”: Experience and Finitude in the Nonrepresentational Landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet

This paper presents and explicates the anonymous and impersonal spatialities tentatively mapped in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Emerging from the kinds of landscapes and visualities articulated, these spatialities are at odds with the kind of anthropocentrism characteristic of phenomenological narratives of spatial experience that would start from an apparently stable human-subject position. It is argued that his body of literature dismantles the anthropocentric narratives and biographies that would produce in both the space of the world and the ‘phenomenological subject’ an unwarranted depth and naturalism. Importantly, and reflecting the theoretical turn towards the being of language, Robbe-Grillet questions the legitimacy of linguistic subjects to capture the spaces of the visible. As such, it is argued that his literature reflects an experience of the critiques of phenomenology. Importantly, this ‘critique’ goes hand in hand with the kinds of spatialities and landscapes that are rendered in the novels—the indefinite perspectives they open up, the paradoxical visualities they sustain or deny, and the disorientation they inject into the heart of spatial experience. These literary effects produce a nonanthropocentric and nonpersonal spatiality which, although contributing to an erasure of the ‘subject’, at the same time expose and open up a sociospatiality based on singularities, intensities, and finitude.

Aika toistaa

Time to reprise. From Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La reprise, through Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, to Michel Houellebecq’s novel La possibilité d’une île – and back again In this article I examine time as a durational entity in two recently published French novels, La reprise (2001) by Alain Robbe-Grillet and La possibilité d’une île (2005) by Michel Houellebecq. My premise concerning time is that repetition (or reprise) establishes all duration, but on the other hand the experience of time also needs difference. In other words, with the extreme repetition of the same, time disappears. My premise concerning the works of art is that every artwork carries (its unique) time, or duration, in its composition. How, then, is it possible to set up a durational immanence of time in literature, especially in its discursive continuum? In literary texts, such as Robbe-Grillet’s and Houillebeck’s novels, this must be executed through durational meaning. Both novels use repetition (or reprise) as their main strategy to create time (or timelessness), but the outcome is opposite. Robbe-Grillet develops an image of enriched duration as a “cathedral of thinking”, as he himself has put it. La reprise is a reprise of Robbe-Grillet’s earlier oeuvre. The thematic variations create a rhizomatic universe of meaning, which is characteristic for the great music dramas of Richard Wagner. In Robbe-Grillet’s novel the narrator doubles himself, and the novel creates two different textual universes: the body text and the footnote text. Two narrator voices fight with each other. This structural technique creates a strong web of durational meaning. In his “clone novel” Houellebecq clones time so that durational meaning, and thus time, almost vanishes, so that in the end of the novel the future horizon is totally empty. This effect is created also through the use of language and thematic of scientific humanism laced with discourses of libidinal capitalism. According to Houellebecq the pessimist, even Wagner’s art cannot comfort him anymore. Science has won all art. However the emptiness of time in his novel’s last page already creates a new promise. The death of art is as impossible as the death of durational mind, the fabulatrix.

Adaptation and the Art of Survival

Adaptation and the Art of Survival

Visualising Stereotypes: Subversion and Sexuality in the Works of Robbe-Grillet

The work of Alain Robbe-Grillet is laden with references to sexuality, and in some of his works, sexual stereotypes are strongly linked to myths or stereotypes of exoticism. This is true of two of his works that are set in the Mediterranean; his first film, L'Immortelle, and most recent screenplay, C'est Gradiva qui vous appelle, both of which can be considered re-workings of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy. This paper analyses these works in the light of the works of the phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose notion of the phenomenological reduction allows for an assessment of the extent to which Robbe-Grillet succeeds in his stated aim of subverting stereotypical forms of novel writing and film making. Merleau-Ponty's account of sexuality, which has been challenged and adopted by feminist film critics in recent years, is also used to analyse Robbe-Grillet's depiction of the sexual stereotypes he aims to subvert.

How to Do Nothing with Words, or Waiting for Godot as Performativity

This essay analyzes how Waiting for Godot exposes the structural logic of both rhetorical and dramatic performativity. Drawing on the languagephilosophy of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Begam considers what happens to ‘‘performative’’ locutions – statements that actually make things happen, such as ‘‘I now pronounce you man and wife’’ – when they are theatrically represented. Austin claims that such locutions when uttered on stage are rendered intransitive – i.e., they lose their performative force – and are therefore relegated to the Kantian realm of the purely aesthetic. Yet Beckett’s play spends two acts demonstrating that the primary function of language is not ‘‘constative’’ – not meant to give us a picture or representation of reality. Rather, Beckett’s conception of language – drawn from his reading of Mauthner – is essentially performative. But if words, phrases, and sentences all function performatively, if all descriptive uses of language are, in fact, instrumental uses, then the larger effect is to return illocutionary or transitive force to the theatre. As a result, Beckett’s play breaks through the wall not only of Ibsenian realism but also of Kantian aestheticism, reclaiming for the dramatic event the kind of ‘‘there-ness’’ that Alain Robbe-Grillet discovered in the first performances of Godot.

Editor's Column: Changes and Continuities in The Comparatist

In introducing my first issue of The Comparatist, I am deeply aware of the growth and development of the journal under the guidance of my predecessors. From its beginnings as a vehicle primarily for the publication of papers delivered at the annual conference of the Southern Comparative Literature Association to its status as a nationally and internationally recognized publication in the field, The Comparatist has been enriched by the editorial wisdom and hard work of Jeanne Smoot, Mechthild Cranston, Marcel Cornis-Pope, and John Burt Foster. The current issue introduces not only a new editor but also a major change in the journal's publication status: it is the first to be published by the University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill. The journal's new look and streamlined distribution, among other changes, come from the press's professional oversight. In addition, the journal has in a sense come home, in that it is now sponsored again by North Carolina State University at Raleigh, where it began. The contributions to this issue reflect certain traditions of the SCLA and of The Comparatist, together with innovative scholarship. From its inception, the SCLA conference offered sessions on literature and the other arts, as well as on East-West literary relations. The Comparatist has published a number of essays dealing with the relations of literature to visual arts and music and has been encouraging a more globalized approach to comparative literature. The essays here grouped under Inter-Art Relations and East /West Intersections offer fresh approaches as well as continuities in those fields. The question of comparative literature's relationship to cultural studies, which has preoccupied our discipline at least since the publication of the Bernheimer report ten years ago, has also been evident in the journal. The authors in the final grouping address that issue from divergent angles. Ben Stoltzfus's essay on Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jasper Johns approaches the traditional inter-art subject of literature and painting through the lenses of meta-fiction, autopoesis, and chaos theory. Robbe-Grillet's text La Cible is unique in that it incorporates and reworks in verbal terms items from Johns's painting Target With Plaster Casts. The visual and the verbal artist each restructures the apparently random elements in his composition through the orderly disorder described in chaos theory. Working against the grain of established doxa, both painting and text deconstruct meaning, while attaining higher levels of insight. Stolzfus provides new perspectives on this vital relationship. The possibilities of visual-verbal artistic interactions are illuminated from a different perspective in Corinne Andersen's comparison of Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas with the photograph by Man Ray that serves as its frontispiece. Using the comparison to refute traditional criticisms of The Autobiography as exemplifying Stein's monumental egotism, Andersen demonstrates how the construction of the photograph calls attention to and complements Stein's critique of autobiography as a genre purporting to be referential or to tell the truth. In Stoltzfus's and Andersen's esays, verbal and visual languages appear to refract each other while constructing their own realities. The East-West comparative axis that seemed clearly delineated years ago has become more complex in our current understanding of global configurations, where the identity of the cardinal points is not always so clear and the interactions among cultures is more frequent. Two types of East-West intersections are emphasized in the essays under the second rubric, edited by John Burt Foster, Jr. Ling Chung also uses visuals to help illustrate the far-Western poet Gary Snyder's encounter with Eastern religions by way of perceived correspondences between Native-American and Asian shamanism. Moving between anthropology and literature, Chung demonstrates how experience with shamans not only influenced Snyder's personal life but also how shamanistic initiation rites are embedded in the deep structure of his poetry. …

Robbe-Grilletís and Johnsís Targets: Metafiction, Autopoiesis, and Chaos Theory

Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote La Cible (The Target) as an introduction catalogue for 1978 Jasper Johns exhibition at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The introduction was unconventional because it was fiction and bore no resemblance interpretive comments or critical analyses that normally accompany such texts. It was not, except perhaps indirectly, an introduction art of Johns, although it did use his Pop-art objects, paintings, and titles as generative sources for fictional narrative. In same year, text was incorporated into Robbe-Grillet's novel, Souvenirs du triangle d'or (130-150). In 1950s, in France, nouveaux romanciers were rejecting mimesis, and in United States, around 1960s, Pop artists were rejecting Abstract Expressionism of de Kooning and Pollock. Pop artists and new novelists were fascinated with objects, they were foregrounding language of art, and they were highlighting creative process. Johns's and Robbe-Grillet's use of things, such as a lightbulb or a coffee pot, led some critics accuse them, and Robbe-Grillet in particular, of killing novel and dehumanizing art. Robbe-Grillet's detailed description of a centipede led commentators describe nouveau roman as l'ecole du regard (the school of gaze) and label its practices chosisme (thingishness). In due course cool objectivity of Robbe-Grillet's style, known for its absence of psychological analysis, was labeled le stylo camera. The termis Alexandre Astruc's, and concept of camera-pen refers a cinema capable of expressing abstract thought. In this sense, Robbe-Grillet's style is sometimes described as cinematographic. The term thingishness also applies Johns's art, particularly his ale cans, flashlights, flags, targets, and plaster casts. At every point in nature, says Johns, there is something see. My work contains similar possibilities for changing focus of eye (quoted in Francis, 109). It is not surprising that Robbe-Grillet would incorporate Johns's objects into his writing, notably La Cible. Johns's and Robbe-Grillet's work poses question, What is a painting? or What is a novel? Michael Crichton points out that Johns may attach an object canvas in such a way as to throw doubt onto meaning of object--even when it is commonplace, such as a cup or a broom or a fork (25). Objects are defamiliarized because expectations of cause and effect are not fulfilled. The viewer is perplexed because Johns's apparently useful objects, like Marcel Duchamp's urinal, have lost their utility. As Barbara Rose puts it, the newspapers and books can't be read: piano can't be played; misshapen cutlery and bent hangers can't be used; drawers don't open (66). Pop art, says Lucy Lippard, also chose depict everything previously considered unworthy of notice. It used advertising, newspaper illustrations, gaudy furnishings, film stars, pin-ups, and cartoons. Nothing was (82). Robbe-Grillet, however, does view such objects as sacred, precisely because they have been elevated iconic status. For us, he says, they have same value that so-called sacred objects of antiquity had for their cultures--objects that archaeologists have been uncovering for decades, if not centuries (UCLA Lectures, 4 May 1978). The subject matter of Topologie d'une cite fantome is archaeology of successive ancient civilizations, whereas subject matter of La Cible highlights objects excavated during mid-twentieth century. The purpose of this archaeology is incorporate objects--be they chairs, coat-hangers, hooks, ale cans, flashlights, lightbulbs, or shoes--into a narrative discourse that speaks language of mass consumption--a consumption engendered by advertising and ideology that accompanies it; while at same time highlighting presence of manufactured objects in everybody's life. …

Illness, Ritual and Liminality in the Post-Nouveau Roman

Over the last twenty years or so, critics in France and elsewhere have been particularly exercised by the problem of defining the essential characteristics of the contemporary French novel. The anti-climax following the heady controversies regarding the nouveau and the apparent absence of a new readily identifiable literary movement seemed to leave critics rather bemused. (1) The various surveys of late twentieth-century French fiction are perhaps above all characterised by the sheer plethora of authors cited, a tendency which in itself suggests a degree of critical indecisiveness. A few stalwarts continued the onslaught on the nouveau and, as late as 1995, Nelly Wolf was advancing rather jaded apocalyptic arguments to the effect that it was largely responsible for the bankruptcy of humanist discourse in France, that it had produced an obsession with form in the teaching of French literature and that it had resulted in stagnation in fiction production. (2) If such sweeping dismissive generalisations were the exception rather than the rule, it remains true, nevertheless, that for many critics the legacy of the nouveau is, by and large, formal in nature. Consequently, much of the most serious criticism of the last two decades has tended to focus on the structural dynamics of the text, whether written by Echenoz, Toussaint, Oster, Gailly, Deville, or Chevillard. (3) Though the vocabulary may have evolved in response to the prevailing theoretical context, the fundamental critical agenda of research in the post-nouveau roman (4) has changed relatively little since the effective demise of the nouveau and few are the studies which do not focus on a combination of the following: intertextuality and citationnalite; reflexivity; the recycling of archetypal structures (detective fiction, the quest, science fiction, the fairy-tale); the ludic blurring of the distinction between fiction, biography, autobiography and autofiction. With the emergence, however, of writers such as Jean Rouaud, Francois Bon, Pierre Michon, Pierre Bergounioux, Frederique Clemencon, Laurent Mauvignier, and Helene Lenoir, who situate themselves more comfortably within the lineage of Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute, rather than within that of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Jean Ricardou, the beginnings of a shift in the criticism can also be detected. This shift, though still primarily perceptible in reviews and in the various survey guides published over the last decade or so, (5) unambiguously restates critical interest in certain traditional themes--family, heritage and history; memory and commemoration; the subtexts of human action and interaction; the relationships between the generations, between the individual and the community, between the individual and his/her terroir; metropolis, banlieue and province--and, perhaps most important, reinstates meaning at the centre of critical enquiry. Moreover, this preoccupation with meaning concerns not only the processes of its production within the text, but also the processes by which it is produced in the referential world, including the various linguistic and gestural codes by which a given community or social group communicates, the codes of behaviour and customs which the community assumes, the symbolic objects which it creates, the symbolic spaces which it delimits, and the rituals which it observes, as well as the equally significant transgression of those codes, boundaries and rituals. The present study locates itself within this critical tendency and aims, through the analysis of Jean Rouaud's Loire-Inferieure quintet, (6) Laurent Mauvignier's Apprendre a finir (2001) and Helene Lenoir's Le Repit (2003), as well as the most recent novel (Le Tramway, 2001) by the oldest living veteran of the nouveau roman, Claude Simon, to show the thematic (as well as formal) continuity which links the contemporary French novel with its literary ancestors of the 1960s and 1970s. The occurrence within each of these texts of one specific sort of life-crisis--serious physical illness--testifies, in particular, to a shared preoccupation with embodied experience and the multiple meanings which we attach to it. …

Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History by Amy Hollywood (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 791 Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference,and the Demands ofHistory. By Amy Hollywood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002. xvi + 320pp. $19. ISBN 0-226-34952-7. In this engaging and original analysis of works by Bataille, Beauvoir, Lacan, and Iri? garay,Amy Hollywood explores the figureof the mystic in writers who?implicitly or otherwise?recognize its association with female empowerment. The text opens with the screams of thirteenth-century mystic Angela of Foligno, experiencing a moment of extreme union with Christ in the church of St Francis in Assisi. Considered at first to be in the throes of demonic possession, she subsequently convinced a Franciscan friar,who transcribed her witness accounts, that she was in intense communication with God and her screams were due to his unwelcome withdrawal. The emotional process at work here, of extreme experience followed by desolation, or what Holly? wood calls 'intensifying spirals of abjection and ecstasy' (p. 12), has appealed to a number of twentieth-century thinkers, who have incorporated their own fascination with emotional, bodily, and excessive forms of mysticism into their philosophical work. In exploring the possibilities mysticism holds for overcoming the boundaries of self and other, for subverting the distinction between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, or body and soul, and for the unusual form of agency and voice it offers to women, mysticism speaks enticingly to a number of modern theoretical preoccupations. Hollywood deftly mines this rich seam of critical thought, producing a series of convincing and lucid analyses of some key French thinkers who work surprisingly well in tandem. The result is a compelling and illuminating text, which offersexciting new perspectives on well-known theorists. There are some genuinely intriguing insights here: for instance, the recognition that psychoanalysis and mys? ticism share a similarly doubled structure?both are founded upon a language and an experience of (divine) presence, but both equally subvert that unity through the positing of an unassimilable remainder, a mystical affect that goes beyond 'the all' (p. 153); or the understanding that witnessing, in Bataille, is profoundly ambiguous, encapsulating the ethical desire to experience the other's suffering,but also the relentless and solipsistic desire forself-shattering ecstasy. The readings ofthe divine in texts by Irigaray and Simone de Beauvoir are also masterful, weaving their way through complex intertwinings of mysticism, belief, the body, and sexual difference. In short, this is an excellent volume; continually provocative and consistently accessible, it offersan array of illuminating and refreshingly differentcritiques. St John's College, Cambridge Victoria Best A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano's Postmodern Fictions. By Akane Kawakami. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2000. 166 pp. ?32.95 (pbk 15.95). ISBN 0-85323-526-0 (pbk 0-85323-536-8). The picture of Modiano to emerge from Akane Kawakami's study is of a rather withdrawn figure, a writer who is suspicious and even dismissive of 'high literature' and especially ofthe academic interest itgenerates. Almost as a response to this attitude his own work has yet to receive any lengthy,serious critical attention from the academic establishment in France. Not only is he dismissed by many as a 'popular novelist', but he is seen to be a writer who consciously reworks his themes and situations to produce 'le roman Modiano', ensuring himself high sales and a permanent place in the best-sellers' list (p. 111). Certainly Modiano's presence on the literary scene by the early twenty-firstcentury is undeniable; to date he has produced twenty novels, numerous short stories, filmscenarios, and children's books, and ifan observation by Alain Robbe-Grillet in an Apostrophes programme from a few years back is to be ...

Image réelle, image textuelle, image virtuelle

I M A G E REELLE, I M A G E T E X T U E L L E , I M A G E V I R T U E L L E Alain Robbe-Grillet De l'Academie francaise

Liberating Structures: Non-Visual Systems in the Art of Sol LeWitt

LIBERATING STRUCTURES, NON-VISUAL SYSTE~IS IN TIlE ART OF SOL LEWITT Mette Gieskes is a dOClOral s!udclII illlilc Dcpartmcnr ofAn and Arr His/ory. Ullil'CrsiZI' of Texas. AIISlill. ln the tumultuous decade of the 19605. various anists. composers. authors. :md film directors chose to base their \\'orks on predetermined systems as a means of 3voiding convention. rcpresentation, and personal habit. They sclecled a sel of rules Ihm \Vere strictl)' followed during the cxecution of the \Vork. These syslem·based works secm particularly self-referen!Ia!. )'e1 the systemic generators \Vere frequently imponed from other fields: composer Pierre Boulez based Structure la for t 'o pianos on a \\'ork of Paul Klee. Alain Robbe-Grillet based Iwo movIes on seriaI and aleatorv structures encountered in contemporar)' music. l the writers associated with the O~lipo Group subjeeted their work to fonnal panerns from mathematics and chess. and Sol LeWin investigated the liberating em'cts for art of architectural. musical. and narrative structures. Why were sa many artists at this especiaJly turbulent moment in histo!)' interested in systems? 1 argue that the employment of systemic structures. which are inherently a----centric and non--hierarehical. not only provided an alternative to the more expressionist art from the immediate pa st-for yisual artists this \Vas abstract expressionism--but in a less obvious manner also reflected a rejection of the cstablished order of society. 1 further propose that the adoption of systems from other mediums added an extra libcTating dimension to the alread)' liberating effect of the systemic as sHch. serving ta preyent r('cession into a convenlional usage of the medium. The focus of this paper is the work of American visual anist Sol LeWin, a su il able figure for the subjeci of this collection perhaps especially because of the interplay in his work of image and texl, and his belief Ihal ideas in themselves can be \Vorks of art. whether they be gi\'en visual, verbal. aurai shape, or no fonn al aIl. His few but influential writings from the late 1960s, most notably Paragraphs on Conceplual Art and Sentences on Conceptua! An:' are indeed best known for describing and promoling a kind ofart thal is based on ideas mther tnar: on fOim. Since 1965, LeWin has b::tsed his structures, walldrawings. and prints on a simple idea. such as Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974). Before cxecuting. or giving physical shape 10 the artwork. LeWin wmild come up with a set of verbal instructions. or rules. that he himself or his assistants were ta follow closely. Although the idea ilself is often logical. the physical m::tnifestation is generally perceptually illogical. and hard to analvz.e in the absence of a verbal description or schematic plan.~ ln order to conceive Ihe system behind the haphazard appeaTancc of the piece. the viewer has to becomc memally cngaged to fmd the key to the system, just as in detective stories-which LeWin lil.:ed ta read-the reader unravels the puzzle by actively analyzing and correlating the clues. 3 1 have chosen. however. to focus not on the idea---and language--oriemedness of lcWitt s art, nor on the delicate and dynamic encounter of idea, word. and image in his ork. but to conccntrnte instead on the less thoroughly examined l'ole of systems in the artist's \York of the 1960s and early '70s.

Review: Intersexual Rivalry: A 'Reading in Pairs' of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet

Review: Intersexual Rivalry: A 'Reading in Pairs' of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet

Intersexual Rivalry: A 'Reading in Pairs' of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet

Intersexual Rivalry: A 'Reading in Pairs' of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet