For A New Novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet

For A New Novel
Essays on Fiction
by Alain Robbe-Grillet

A couple of weekends ago I finally got around to reading Robbe-Grillet's sole book of criticism, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed. While I'll be the first to admit that some of the essays contained within pale in comparison to others, overall it's a very worthwhile collection, particularly if one needs help articulating why experimental fiction is far more progressive (and not necessarily in the "grand narrative" sense) than (for want of a better word) "normal" fiction. I've decided to share a few excerpts from various essays that I found particularly potent.

"The same is true of the world around us. We had thought to control it by assigning it a meaning, and the entire art of the novel, in particular, seemed dedicated to this enterprise. But this was merely an illusory simplification; and far from becoming clearer and closer because of it, the world has only, little by little, lost all its life. Since it is chiefly in its presence that the world's reality resides, our task is now to create a literature which takes that presence into account."

from "A Future for the Novel"

"How much we've heard about the "character"! Moreover, I fear we haven't heard the last. Fifty years of disease, the death notice signed many times over by the most serious essayists, yet nothing has yet managed to knock it off the pedestal on which the nineteenth century had placed it. It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same--phony--majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism. In fact, that is how this criticism recognizes the "true" novelist: "he creates characters"...

In order to justify the cogency of this point of view, the customary reasoning is employed: Balzac has given us Père Goriot, Dostoevski has created the Karamazovs, hence writing novels can no onger be anything but that: adding some modern figures to the portrait gallery constituted by our literary history.

A character--everyone knows what the word means. It is not a banal he, anonymous and transparent, the simple subject of the action expressed by the verb. A character must be given a proper name, two if possible: a surname and a given name. He must have parents, a heredity. He must have a profession. If he has possessions as well, so much the better. Finally, he must possess a "character," a face which reflects it, a past which has molded that face and that character. His character dictates his actions, makes him react to each event in a determined fashion. His character permits the reader to judge him, to love him, to hate him. It is thanks to his character that he will one day bequeath his name to a human type, which was waiting, it would seem, for the consecration of this baptism.

For the character must be unique and at the same time must rise to the level of a category. He must have enough individuality to remain irreplaceable, and enough generality to become universal. One may, for variety's sake, to give oneself some impression of freedom, choose a hero who seems to transgress one of these rules: a foundling, a vagrant, a madman, a man whose uncertain character harbors here and there some small surprise... One must not exagerate, however, in this direction: that is the road to perdition, which leads straight to the modern novel.

None of the great contemporary works, in fact, corresponds on this point to the norms of criticism. How many readers recall the narrator's name in Nausea or in The Stranger? Are these human types? Would it not be, on the contrary, the worst absurdity to regard these books as character studies? And does the Journey to the End of the Night describe a character? Does anyone suppose, moreover, that it is an accident these three novels are written in the first person? Beckett changes his hero's names and shape in the course of the same narrative. Faulkner purposely gives the same name to two different persons. As for the K of The Castle, he is content with an initial, he possesses nothing, has no family, no face; he is probably not even a land surveyor at all.

The examples can be mulitplied. As a matter of fact, the creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe. The novel of characters belongs entirely to the past, it described a period: that which marked the apogee of the individual.

Perhaps this is not an advance, but it is evident that the present period is rather one of administrative numbers. The world's destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise or fall of certain men, of certain families. The world itself is no longer our private property, hereditary and convertible into cash, a prey which it is not so much a matter of knowing as of conquering. To have a name was doubtless very important in the days of Balzac's bourgeoisie. A character was important--all the more important for being the weapon in a hand-tohand struggle, the hope of a success, the exercise of a domination. It was something to have a face in a universe where personality represented both the means and the end of all exploration.

Our world, today, is less sure of itself, more modest perhaps, since it has renounced the omnipotence of the person, but more ambitious too, since it looks beyond. The exclusive cult of the "human" has given way to a larger consciousness, one that is less anthropocentric. The novel seems to stagger, having lost what was once its best prop, the hero. If it does not manage to right itself, it is because its life was linked to that of a society now past. If it does manage, on the contrary, a new course lies open to it, with the promise of new discoveries."


"But for the artist, on the contrary, and despite his firest political convictions--even despite his good will as a militant revoluationary--art cannot be reduced to the status of a means in the service of a cause which transcends it, even if this cause were the most deserving, the most exalting; the artist puts nothing above his work, and he soon comes to realize that he can create only for nothing; the least external directive paralyzes him, the least concern for didacticism, or even for signification, is an insupportable constraint; whatever his attachment to his party or to generous ideas, the moment of creation can only bring him back to the problems of his art, and to them alone."

"To speak of the content of a novel as something independent of its form comes down to striking the genre as a whole from the realm of art. For the work of art contains nothing, in the strict sense of the term (that is, as a box can hold--or be empty of--some object of an alien nature). Art is not a more or less brilliantly colored envelope intended to embellish the author's "message," a gilt on paper around a package of cookies, a whitewash on a wall, a sauce that maeks the fish go down easier. Art endures no servitude of this kind, nor any other pre-established function. It is based on no truth that exists before it; and one may say that it expresses nothing but itself. It creates its own equilibrium and its own meaning. It stands all by itself, like the zebra; or else it falls."

above all from "On Several Obsolete Notions"

"Metaphor, which is supposed to express only a comparison, without any particular motive, actually introduces a subterranean communication, a movement of sympathy (or of antipathy) which is its true raison d'être. For, as comparison, metaphor is almost always a useless comparison which contributes nothing new to the description."

"To describe things, as a matter of fact, is deliberately to place oneself outside of them, confronting them. It is no longer a matter of appropriating them to oneself, of projecting anything onto them. Posited, from the start, as not being man, they remain constantly out of reach and are, ultimately, neither comprehended in a natural alliance nor recovered by suffering. To limit oneself to description is obviously to reject all the other modes of approaching the object: sympathy as unrealistic, tragedy as alienating, comprehension as answerable to the realm of science exclusively."

from "Nature, Humanism, Tragedy"

"What Italo Svevo tells us in his way is that in our modern society nothing is any longer natural. Nor is there even any reason to be upset about it. We can be quite happy, talk, make love, do business, wage war, write novels; but nothing of all this will any longer be done without thinking about it, the way one breathes. Under our gaze, the simple gesture of holding out our hand becomes bizarre, clumsy; the words we hear ourselves speaking suddenly sound false; the time of our minds is no longer that of the clocks; and the style of a novel, in its turn, can no longer be innocent."

from "Zeno's Sick Conscience"

"And in the last twenty years, no doubt, matters have accelerated, but not only in the realm of art, as everyone will agree. If the reader sometimes has difficulty getting his bearings in the modern novel, it is in the same way that he sometimes loses them in the very world where he lives, when everything in the old structures and the old norms around him is giving way."

"Why persist in discovering what an individual's name is in a novel which does not supply it? Every day we meet people whose names we do not know, and we can talk to a stranger for a whole evening, when we have not even paid any attention to the introductions made by the hostess."

both above from "New Novel, New Man"

"It is natural that the novel, which, like every art, claims to precede systems of thought and not to follow them, should already be in the process of melting down the terms of other pairs of contraries: matter-form, objectivity-subjectivity, signification-absurdity, construction-destruction, memory-presence, imagination-reality, etc."

from "From Realism to Reality"