Far from representing a rejection of the past, the quest for a new novel was thus very much in keeping with the history of a genre which, by definition, must always be renewed.įeeling that his work was too often misrepresented by the critical establishment (with a few notable exceptions including Barthes, Blanchot and Nabokov), Robbe-Grillet published a series of articles to set the record straight. In his essays, he returns time and again to the notion that the novel, from Stendhal to Joyce, has constantly evolved - hence the absurdity of using “the norms of the past” to judge the fiction of today. Along with Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon- the main proponents of the new novel (nouveau roman) - Robbe-Grillet stood resolutely in the second camp.
He has a point - albeit one that Alain Robbe-Grillet had already made in 1965 when he deplored the fact that young French novelists were praised for writing “like Stendhal” but castigated as soon as they refused to abide by the “dead rules” of a bygone age. “In no way,” claimed the author of Reality Hunger, “do they convey what it feels like to live in the 21st century.” Photograph: Daniel Janin/AFP/Getty Imagesĭavid Shields recently dismissed most contemporary novels as “antediluvian texts” that “could have been written by Flaubert 150 years ago”. A novel ‘expresses nothing but itself’ … Alain Robbe-Grillet.
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