Alain Robbe-Grillet

Robbe-Grillet, Alain

(älăN` rôb-grēyā`), 1922–2008, French novelist and filmmaker, b. Brest. Robbe-Grillet is considered the originator of the French nouveau roman [new novel], in which conventional story is subordinated to structure and the significance of objects is stressed above that of human motivation or action. His influential essay Pour un nouveau roman (1963; tr. Toward a New Novel, 1966) provided the theoretical groundwork for the genre. Robbe-Grillet's first novel, Les Gommes (tr. The Erasers, 1964), was published in 1953. Among his other novels, many of them marked by violence, are Le Voyeur (1955; tr. The Voyeur, 1958), La jalousie (1957; tr. Jealousy, 1960), Dans le labyrinthe (1959; tr. In the Labyrinth, 1960), Instantanés (1962; tr. Snapshots, 1968), La Maison de Rendez-vous (1965; tr. 1966, The House of Assignation, 1970), Topologie d'une cité fantôme (1976; tr. Topology of a Phantom City, 1977), Djinn (1981, tr. 1982), Les dernier jours de Corinthe [the last days of Corinth] (1994), La reprise (2001; tr. Repetition, 2003), and Un roman sentimental (2007; tr. A Sentimental Novel, 2014), his last book. Robbe-Grillet's film works include the screenplay for Alain Resnais's enigmatic classic L'annèe dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) as well as those for L'immortelle [the immortal one] (1962), Trans-Europ-Express (1966), L'Eden and l'après (Eden and After, 1970), La belle captive (The Beautiful Prisoner, 1983), and Un bruit qui rend fou (The Blue Villa, 1996), which he also directed. In 2004 he became a member of the Académie Française.

Bibliography

See his memoir Ghosts in the Mirror (1984, tr. 1991); studies by B. Morrissette (1965), R. Armes (1981), J. Fletcher (1983), B. F. Stoltzfus (1985), R. L. Ramsay (1992), L. D. Roland (1994), M. H. Hellerstein (1998), and R. C. Smith (2000).

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain

 

Born Aug. 18, 1922, in Brest, department of Finistere. French writer and film director; one of the founders of the “new novel.”

Educated as an agricultural engineer, Robbe-Grillet was first published in 1953. In his depersonalized, flat narratives, Robbe-Grillet’s obsessive description of objects pushes aside both the narrative and the characters (for example, the novels The Voyeur, 1955, and Jealousy, 1957). Gradually these verbal still lifes grow into hallucinations of a chaotic, capricious, and defective world (the novel In the Labyrinth, 1959, and the film screenplay Last Year at Marienbad, 1961). This world cannot be animated by criminal events (the novel La Maison de rendez-vous, 1965), by a speculative response to political issues of the day (the novel Project for a Revolution in New York, 1970), or by morbid eroticism (the novel and film Glissements progressifs du plaisir, 1973).

WORKS

Pour un Nouveau Roman. Paris, 1963.
In Russian translation:
“V labirinte.” lnostrannaia literatura, 1961, no. 1. (Excerpt.)

REFERENCES

Velikovskii, S. “V laboratorii raschelovechivaniia iskusstva.” In the collection O sovremennoi burzhuaznoi estetike, vol. 1. Moscow, 1963.
Zonina, L. “‘Novyi roman’: vchera, segodnia.” Voprosy literatury, 1974, NO. 11.
Eremeev, L. A. Frantsuzskii “novyi roman.” Kiev, 1974.
Morrissette, B. Le Roman de Robbe-Grillet. [Paris, 1963.]
Ricardou, J. Pour une Théorie du nouveau roman. Paris [1971].
Gardies, A. A Robbe-Grillet. [Paris, 1972.]

S. I. VELIKOVSKII

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.