Dublin Opinion

I appear to be becoming somewhat of the obituarist about these parts. If only this ageing French population would slow up a bit on the dying ! During the latter part of February news came through of the passing away at the age of 85 of one of France’s better known postwar novelists - Alain Robbe-Grillet. News of his death brought me back to my undergraduate days when I found the difficulty of the novels and other prose pieces of his composition we were given to study as fairly conclusive proof that the author must be still living. In France, Robbe-Grillet was best known as the ‘pape du nouveau roman’ - the pontiff of what came to be labelled the ‘new novel’. Robbe-Grillet earned himself this label through his 1963 manifesto-like publication ‘Pour un nouveau roman’. In this book he outlined his wishes for the novel of the latter part of the twentieth century. Basically, the enemies were subjectivity, characterisation and Balzac. Robbe Grillet enlisted the (posthumous or otherwise) support of four authors he felt were pre-cursors of this new novel. From memory, his judgement was not too off - among his ideal anthology he included Italo SVEVO - Joyce’s Triestine friend and pupil, the enigmatic Raymond ROUSSEL, our own Samuel BECKETT and Joe BOSQUET - a French author who was paralysed by a German bullet during the First World War.

Robbe-Grillet got to meet only one of the four authors of his ideal modern anthology in his lifetime - Beckett. Beckett and Robbe-Grillet are published in France by the same publisher - the wonderful Editions de Minuit. In the below photo we see most of the leading authors of the ‘Nouveau Roman’ together in Paris at some point in the late 50s - Robbe-Grillet himself, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget (whom Beckett translated into English) and Nathalie Sarraute. Among this jovial band is also to be found Jérôme Lindon, the editor at Editions de Minuit who made the enlightened decision to publish Beckett’s prose work (and almost certainly Robbe-Grillet’s too).

Robbe-Grillet is probably best known in the English-speaking world for having written the screenplay for Alain RESNAIS’s striking 1961 film ‘L’année dernière à Marienbad’ (Last year at Marienbad). He was responsible, as director, for a dozen or so films since Marienbad - usually imposing on himself the same formalistic restraints he imposed on his writing and more than usually ending up with an S & M subject matter - as in ‘La belle esclave’, ‘Glissements progressifs du plaisir’ or ‘L’Eden et après’.

In the year preceding his death, he managed to direct a final film, ‘Gradiva’, inspired by one of Freud’s essays :

The sumptuousness of the imagery and settings (filmed in Morroco in vividly rich colours) in this film mark somewhat of a contrast with his previous works on film or on paper - apparently in a spirit of self-parody. Along with the obtuseseness of his prose writings, there is often a playfulness - as, for example, with 1981s DJINN which was forced upon us as undergraduates. From my vague recollections, the novel is structured as would be a textbook for teaching French. Aptly enough, Robbe-Grillet was teaching in universities in the US at the time of its publication. As if by chance, the iconoclast ‘Nouveau romancier’ had managed to write a novel that French departments in the English-speaking world could not resist putting on reading lists.

If there are any brave enough among you, translations of Robbe-Grillet’s novels are available through Beckett’s prose publisher in London - Calder. I’m sure the early funny ones - ‘Les Gommes’ (The Erasers), ‘La Jalousie’ (Jealousy) and his novellas ‘Instantanés’ (Snapshots) are on offer. Otherwise, you can attract the attention of Homeland Security by ordering his more recent ‘Projet pour une révolution à New York’ (Plan for a Revolution in New York) or last year’s ‘Un roman sentimental’ (A Sentimental Novel). In the latter case you’ll definitely get what it says on the cover.

The recent passage into mortality of the man who was brazen enough to direct ‘L’immortelle’ (The Immortal) will certainly have done nothing to render his works any more readable.