BOOKS
A LA CARTE
FOR A NEW NOVEL. By Alain Robbe-Grillet. {Translated by Richard
Howard.} Grove Press. $3.95.
LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS. By Alain Robbe-Grillet. {Translated
by Richard Howard.} Grove Press. $4.50.
From the publication of his first novel, Robbe-Grillet became
the center of an unusually engaging critical dialogue; his works have
been preferred objects of analysis for several of the most interesting con–
temporary French critics: Roland Barthes, Bernard Pingaud, Philippe
Sollers, Jean Ricardou, Gerard Genette. In retrospect, it seems clear that
his novels immediately coincided with some of the central preoccupations
of an important segment of "new criticism" in France: a renewed atten–
tion to the structures of literature, to rhetoric, to
ecriture-writing
itself.
When Robbe-Grillet himself turned to criticism, it was evident that his
formulations owed as much to his critics (especially Barthes) as to ex–
trapolation from his own novelistic practice; his criticism is really the
scene of a dialectic between his fictional manner and a critical language
in the process of formation, and this confers considerable interest on the
essays (written between 1953 and 1963) of
For A New Novel.
Incom–
plete, occasionally polemical and sometimes illogical, they are important
gropings toward a new rhetoric of the novel.
At the start of Robbe-Grillet's rhetoric are a number of well-pub–
licized esthetic and philosophical rejections: of the traditional novel's
solid character, with weight, volume and contour; of psychology and
"interiority"; of political or moral commitment; of narrative "innocence"
and verisimilitude; of tragedy, defined by Barthes as a means of "recover–
ing" human misery, subsuming and representing it as a form of neces–
sity. The rejection of the tragic mode entails a refusal of any metaphorical
link between man and nature, an attempt to reify the objective world as
a nonsymbolic presence, a "being there" which will not bear the weight
of any metaphysical or allegorical commentary. The result is what Barthes
,
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