Robbe-Grillet's first novel, A Regicide, was written in the early 1950s but only published

in 1978. His first published novel was The Erasers, in 1953. It resembles a detective
novel, but contains within it a deeper structure based on the story of Oedipus. The
detective is seeking the assassin in a murder that has not yet occurred, only to discover
that it is his destiny to become that assassin.

His next and most acclaimed novel is The Voyeur, first published in French in 1955 and
translated into English in 1958 by Richard Howard. Robbe-Grillet relates the story of
Matthias, a travelling watch salesman who returns to the island of his youth with a
desperate objective. As with many of his novels, The Voyeur revolves around the dubious
details of a murder: throughout the novel, Matthias unfolds a newspaper clipping about
the details of a young girl's murder and the discovery of her body among the seaside
rocks. Matthias' relationship with the dead girl is obliquely revealed in the course of his
psychological disintegration, which is rendered with objective precision in the style for
which Robbe-Grillet is most famous. The narration contains little dialogue, no description
of characters' interior thoughts or emotions, and an ambiguous timeline of events. Indeed,
the novel's opening line is indicative of the novel's tenor: "It was as if no one had heard."
The Voyeur was awarded the Prix des Critiques.

Next, he wrote Jealousy, set on a banana plantation. Written in the first person and in
non-linear sequence, it tells the story of a husband's suspicion that his wife (referred to
only as "A...") is having an affair with his neighbour, Franck. Although the narration
comes from his perspective alone, the husband never uses first-person pronouns. He
recounts events in which he is present as though he were not; his presence there is merely
inferred, e.g. by the number of place settings at the dinner table or deck chairs on the
verandah. He also describes images that can be read as either fantasy or reality, especially
in regard to the affair and to the lovers' deaths. The French title La Jalousie means both
"jealousy" and "window blind", or "shutter", and it is with the husband's eyes, through the
jalousie, that we see the wife's lover.

Robbe-Grillet has also written screenplays, notably for Alain Resnais' 1961 film Last
Year at Marienbad, a critical success considered to be one of the finest French films of
the 1960s. It was followed by a number of films directed by Robbe-Grillet himself:
Trans-Europ-Express (1966), his two French-Slovak films L'homme qui ment/Muž, ktorý
luže (The Man Who Lies) (1968), L'Eden et après/Eden a potom (Eden and After) (1970),
Glissements progressifs du plaisir (The Slow Slidings of Pleasure) (1974), Le jeu avec le
feu (Playing with Fire) (1975), La belle captive (The Beautiful Captive) (1986) and many
others. [Wikipedia]

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/grillet.htm

His statement of how he thought novels should be written was published in POUR UN
NOUVEAU ROMAN (1963). "If in many of the passages that follow, I readily employ
the term New Novel, it is not to designate a school, nor even a specific and constituted
group of writers working in the same direction; the expression is merely a convenient
label applicable to all those seeking new forms for the novel, form capable of expressing
(or of creating) new relations between man and the world, to all those who have
determined to invent the novel, in other words, to invent man."

Robbe-Grillet argued that the writer should content himself with the impersonal
description of physical objects. Psychological or ideological analysis should be excluded
- the reader must guess what hides under details and events. Despite its focus on objective
reality cleansed of human feeling, Robbe-Grillet insisted, the nouveau roman is entirely
subjective - its world is always perceived through the eyes of a character, not an
omniscient narrator. "The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says
it," he once stated. In his essays For a New Novel (1963) Robbe-Grilled condemned the
use of metaphors, because they anthropomorphize objects. This led to his attack on Jean-
Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who, according to Robbe-Grillet, maintained 'a dubious
relationship' with the world. "All my work is precisely engaged in the attempt to bring its
own structures to light."

Several of Robbe-Grillet's works, such as The Voyeur, are mysteries in which the reader
is left to solve the puzzle without "authorized" explanation. The title of the work refers to
Mathias, a traveling watch salesman, who perhaps is a murderer. The book was awarded
the Critics' Prize in 1955 but part of the jury thought that it was not a "novel" at all.
Jealousy is among the most famous nouveaux romans from the 1950s. It is set on a
banana plantation in the tropics, and it also takes a detective-story-like theme. A husband
spies on his wife and her alleged lover Franck, their neighbor, through the openings of a
Venetian blind (jalousie in French). The plot is minimal and the nonexistent role of the
narrator is developed to the utmost limits.

In DJINN (1981) Robbe-Grillet used another popular genre, the spy-story. The
protagonist works for an androgynous American spy, and meets members of a secret
society of latter-day Luddites dedicated to fighting the machine. The narrator is unsure of
the external world; he is told that he is being dreamt, and after a while the story begins to
fold back on itself. The bizarre logic crystallizes in an injured or perhaps dead child and
remembers events that have not yet taken place. "My syllables fall, too, awakening
neither response nor echo, like useless objects deprived of sense. And silence closes in
again. Have I really spoken? Cold, numbness, paralysis begin to spread through my
limbs." LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS (1965) used several points of view, which
contradicted each other. The story, focusing on a evening get together, folds back on itself
various times. LA BELLE CAPTIVE (1975) was based on the myth of the beautiful
captive, and took its themes from the paintings of the French surrealist René Magritte.
Snapshots (1962) included an artistic homage to the painter Gustave Moreau (1826-98) in
the story 'The Secret Room'. Its coldly narrated erotic scene with a chained woman is
filled with sexual violence - a trait which is typical of Robbe-Grillet's later works. "The
man is till standing about yard away, half leaning over her. He looks at her face, seen
upside down, her dark eyes made larger by their surrounding eye-shadow, her mouth
wide open as if screaming. The man's posture allows his face to be seen only in a vague
profile, but one senses in it a violent exaltation, despite the rigid attitude, the silence, the
immobility." (from 'The Secret Room')
In 1984 Robbe-Grillet published LE MIRROR QUI REVIENT, the first volume of an
autobiographical trilogy, Romanesques. In his latest works he has acknowledged Claude
Simon's dictum that 'Everything is autobiographical, even the imaginary'. According to
Robbe-Grillet, life is not overtly meaningful or absurd, it is rather simple. The theme of
the labyrinth links Robbe-Grillet to Borges - they both are fascinated by interpretations
inside interpretations. Labyrinths are also the terrain of spy fiction, and in LA REPRISE
(2001) a spy is sent to post-war Berlin on a mission which becomes for him a sado-erotic
experience. "All my novels are comic. Perhaps La Reprise more so", Robbe-Griller has
said of his best-selling book.

Robbe-Grillet's emphasis on the visual world led him in the 1960s to writing scenarios
and directing films. Some of his novels have also been called ciné-romans (film-novels).
These works have challenged the limits of expected narrative structures and conventional
realism. Robbe-Grillet's thesis is that the physical world is the only true reality, and the
only way to approach memory is through physical objects. The most famous
dramatization of his literary theories is Alan Resnais's film Last Year at Marienbad, for
which he wrote the screenplay.

The puzzle without solution presents a luxurious country house in which a stranger
(Giorgio Albertazzi) meets a woman (Delphine Seyring), who may or may not have had
an affair with him the previous year, perhaps in Marienbad, or somewhere else. The
viewer never learns whether the meeting took place. The perfectly sculptured silent
gardens, stately camera-work, and detached performances create a dreamlike atmosphere
- the tiny humans in the landscape cast shadows while the manicured bushes do not. Are
the persons the only 'real' figures in the story? Robbe-Grillet's other early films include
Trans-Europ-Express (1966), which circulated elements from Hitchcock films and
gangster movies. L'Éden et aprés (1971) started his color trilogy. In Topology of a
Phantom City (1976) Robbe-Grillet used freeze-frame technique which he then set in
motion. A French policeman investigates the death of a prostitute. David is the
perpetrator of the murder or murders that have taken place; David writes sometimes in
first person. "I am alone. Walking at random. Wandering, as if at random, among the
unrecognizable fragments of what were palatial homes, public buildings, private
residences, gaming houses and houses of prostitution, theatres, temples, and fountains. I
am looking for something."

For further reading: Intersexual rivalry: a "reading in pairs" of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-
Grillet ed. by Julia Waters, Peter Collier (2000); Inventing the Real World by Marjorie H. Hellerstein
(1998); Women in Robbe-Grillet by Lillian Dunmars (1994); Robbe-Grillet and the Fantastic by Virginia
Harger-Grinling, Tony Chadwick, eds. (1994); Robbe-Grillet and Modernity by Raylene L. Ramsay (1992);
The Erotic Dream Machine by Anthony N.Fragola (1992); Duplications et duplicité dans les
'Romanesques' d'Alain Robbe-Grillet by Roger-Michel Allemand (1991); Alain Robbe-Grillet by Ben
Stoltzfus (1987, paperback); Alain Robbe-Grillet by Ilona Leki (1983); Alain Robbe-Grillet, l'éstange by
Jean-Claude Vareille (1981); Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet by Roy Armes (1981); Robbe-Grillet, ed. by
François Jost (1978, in Obliques 16-17); Robbe-Grillet by Jean Ricardou (1976); Les Romans de Robbe-
Grillet by Bruce Morrisette (1975); Pour une théorie du un nouveau roman by Jean Ricardou (1971); Alain
Robbe-Grillet and the New French Novel by Ben Stoltzfus (1964) - The theoretical premises of the
Nouveau roman were collected in Robbe-Grillet's Pour un nouveau roman (1963). See also Michel Butor,
Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, and Nathalie Sarraute. The wave of experimentalism has
been important mainly in France, but also Kafka, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf,
Pirandello, and James Joyce among others have paved way for the literary movement. Later echoes of the
anti-novel has been seen in the works of Uwe Johnson in Germany, Susan Sontag in America, Christine
Brooke-Rose, and Rayner Heppenstall in England.

Selected works:

• LES GOMMES, 1953 - The Erasers

• LE VOYEUR, 1955 - The Voyeur
• LA JALOUSIE, 1957 - Jealousy
• DANS LE LABYRINTHE, 1959 - In the Labyrinth - Labyrintissa
• screenplay: L'ANNÉE DERNIÉRE Á MARIENBAD, 1961 - Last Year at
Marienbad - Viime vuonna Marienbadissa - film 1961, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet,
dir. by Alain Resnais, starring Delphine Seyring, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff - "I got one
clear impression from Last Year at Marienbad, and that was of Resnais and Robbe-Grillet
grinning wickedly at each other above the heads of a trustful public that was flagging its
poor little brain into some notion of what in hell the picture is all about." (Robert Hatch in
Nation, March 24, 1962)
• INSTANTANÉS, 1962 - Snapshots
• POUR UN NOUVEAU ROMAN, 1963 - For a New Novel
• film: L'IMMORTELLE, 1963 - The Immoral One
• LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, 1965 - The House of Assignation
• film: TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS, 1966
• film: L'HOMME QUI MENT, 1968 - The Man Who Lies
• film: PROJECT POUR UNE RÉVOLUTION Á NEW YORK, 1970 - Project for
a Revolution in New York