Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet (French: [alɛ̃ ʁɔb ɡʁijɛ]; 18 August 1922 – 18 February 2008) was a French writer and filmmaker. He was one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman (lit. 'new novel') trend of the 1960s, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on 25 March 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat No. 32. He married Catherine Robbe-Grillet (née Rstakian).

Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in Brest (Finistère, France) to a family of engineers and scientists. He was trained as an agricultural engineer. During the years 1943 and 1944, he participated in compulsory labor in Nuremberg, where he worked as a machinist. The initial few months were seen by Robbe-Grillet as something of a holiday. In between the very rudimentary training he was given to operate the machinery, he had free time to go to the theatre and the opera.

In 1945, he completed his diploma at the National Institute of Agronomy. Later, his work as an agronomist took him to Martinique, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, and Morocco. In 1960, he was a signatory to the Manifesto of the 121 in support of the Algerian struggle for independence. He died in 2008 in Caen after succumbing to heart problems.

Robbe-Grillet's first published novel was The Erasers (Les Gommes), which was issued by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1953. After that, he dedicated himself full-time to his new occupation. His early work was praised by eminent critics, such as Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. Around the time of his second novel, he became a literary advisor for Les Éditions de Minuit and occupied this position from 1955 until 1985. After publishing four novels, in 1961, he worked with Alain Resnais, writing the script for Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad), and he subsequently wrote and directed his own films.

In 1963, Robbe-Grillet published For a New Novel (Pour un Nouveau Roman), a collection of previously published theoretical writings concerning the novel. From 1966 to 1968, he was a member of the High Committee for the Defense and Expansion of French (Haut comité pour la défense et l'expansion de la langue française). In addition, Robbe-Grillet also led the Centre for Sociology of Literature (Centre de sociologie de la littérature) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles from 1980 to 1988. From 1971 to 1995, Robbe-Grillet was a professor at New York University, lecturing on his own novels.

Although Robbe-Grillet was elected to the Académie française in 2004, in his eighties, he was never formally received by the Académie because of disputes regarding the Académie's reception procedures. Robbe-Grillet both refused to prepare and submit a welcome speech in advance, preferring to improvise his speech, as well as refusing to purchase and wear the Académie's famous green tails (habit vert) and sabre, which he considered outdated.

His writing style has been described as "realist" or "phenomenological" (in the Husserlian sense) or "a theory of pure surface". Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace (though often reveal) the psychology and interiority of the character. The reader must slowly piece together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy, for example, in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions, a method that resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured, and the resulting novel resembles the literary equivalent of a cubist painting. Yet his work is ultimately characterized by its ability to mean many things to many different people.

Robbe-Grillet wrote his first novel A Regicide (Un Régicide) in 1949, but it was rejected by Gallimard, a major French publishing house, and only later published with minor corrections by his lifelong publisher Les Éditions de Minuit in 1978. His second novel, The Erasers (Les Gommes), superficially resembles a detective novel, but it contains within it a deeper structure based on the tale of Oedipus. The detective is seeking the assassin in a murder that has not yet occurred, only to discover that it is his destiny to become that assassin.