Alain Robbe-Grillet

is a novelist whose works resist being translated (being ‘read’) into the established terms of bourgeois Literature and offer us, instead, a pure negativity, the meaninglessness of the world of objects.

In a similar fashion, Barthes’s championing of Alain Robbe-Grillet, exponent of the ‘nouveau roman’, rests on Robbe-Grillet’s radical distancing of his novels from the traditional techniques and values of the bourgeois novel. In a series of articles, republished in Critical Essays in 1964, Barthes explored the resistance in Robbe-Grillet’s works to the standard novelistic features of story, narrative point of view, metaphor, the symbolic nature of described objects. Robbe-Grillet’s novels famously deny his readers the ability to translate the objects meticulously described in them into general symbolic and metaphorical themes. In Jealousy (first published in 1957), for example, a narrative voice which is never named and acts merely as a kind of neutral observer, presents a world in which the actions of the few represented characters seem no more significant than the descriptions given of the house (a tropical banana plantation) within which the novel is set, including a series of painstaking descriptions of the remains of squashed centipedes. The effect is to present a novel which is unreadable except on a visual (‘optical’) level: Robbe-Grillet’s novels resist being trans-lated (being ‘read’) into the established terms of bourgeois Literature and offer us, instead, a pure negativity, the meaninglessness of the world of objects. Human beings, in Robbe-Grillet’s novels, are refused the comfort of finding a meaning for their own lives in the objects (natural and man-made) around them. As Barthes puts it: ‘Robbe-Grillet describes objects in order to expel man from them’ (CE: 94). p.30

Alain Robbe Grillet, n.Definitions

Alain Robbe Grillet