Books
How to misread Robbe-Grillet
Published 06 March 2008
Jonathan Meades on the supreme novelist of France's trente glorieuses
Alain Robbe-Grillet died in Caen in the early hours of Monday 18 February. By the end of that day le vioc terrible had posthumously established a thriving, pan-European cottage industry devoted to his valediction. Artisan moralisers, celebrity denouncers, AOC provocateurs, free-range score settlers, craft-based bashers, grand cru groupies. They all had their say and are continuing to have it. Precisely . . . so long as he is being talked about, his shade can rest happy. As in death, so in life.
The daughter of Nathalie Sarraute and widow of Jean-François Revel, Claude Sarraute, responded to Robbe-Grillet's death with what she evidently reckoned to be righteous ire. In fact, she conducted herself like an idiote savante who unwittingly hits most of the nail on the head. She told the Nouvel Observateur that Robbe-Grillet had nicked everything from her mother, was a self-publicist who had exploited a literature invented by her mother for his personal profit in American universities, had based his Pour un nouveau roman on her mother's 'Ère du soupçon, and would go to any lengths to attract attention.
Now, this inventory of charges is both damning and broadly indisputable. But Sarraute has quite overlooked her late husband's dictum that there are no schools, only talents. A truth which should be self-evident but which is subjugated by the ineradicable tendency to classify, to ascribe artists to particular movements, to think in terms of genres, to survey creative endeavour in, so to speak, communitarian rather than individual terms. The question, as Duke Ellington pointed out, should be not whether it's classical music or jazz music but whether it's good music. This is difficult to ask when artists congregate in cosy squadrons, give themselves a collective name, publish manifestos, enact aesthetic legislation, issue compositional edicts.
Robbe-Grillet may have been proudly amused to be known as le pape du nouveau roman - a second-hand sobriquet borrowed from André Breton, le pape du surréalisme - but it caused him to be defined as a literary politician, a spokesman, a figurehead, an aesthetic tyrant whose theoretical essays had the disastrous effect of instructing an audience how to read his texts. Most of the best of these texts had appeared before Pour un nouveau roman was published and so, too, had his two greatest films. I had chanced upon 'Immortelle and then - thankfully, innocently, unsystematically - sought out 'Année dernière à Marienbad, La jalousie, Dans le labyrinthe and La maison de rendez-vous before I was aware of the existence of Pour un nouveau roman. I didn't know what I was meant to make of these films, which had the movement of dreams and nightmares, or this wonderful insidious prose that seemed like it was releasing something that was already there, in your head, occluded in its deepest vaults.
I thus didn't know there was no psychology in his work, because the depiction of impotent jealousy in La jalousie seemed horrible, painful and psychologically acute. I didn't know there was no characterisation because the pimp or protector in 'Immortelle was immediately recognisable as a hideous character. I didn't know there was no emotional affect because the soldier's plight - lost, mistrustful, seeking shelter in a snowbound city - in Dans le labyrinthe is so vividly realised, so elemental that it's harrowing. Marienbad was as hopelessly, mysteriously, swooningly, endlessly romantic as Chateaubriand. I didn't know a writer is someone with nothing to say because Robbe-Grillet said so much, with such gleeful obliquity and with no recourse to an editorial voice. His work evoked moods, provoked unprecedented states of mind, forced its readers to look anew at the physical world.
But all this was a long time ago. He was the supreme novelist of les trente glorieuses, France's 30 years after 1945. And he would come to be regarded as the supreme self-parodist of les trente moins glorieuses, an ancient modernist, a drummer for a dissipated avant-garde, a salesman with nothing left to sell. The propagandist is supposed to have vanquished the artist. His luminous early work is alleged to have been buried beneath his arty pornography and his very public reputation, both as a libertine adept of S&M and échangisme with a famously open marriage and as the contrarian who broke the boundaries of taste as he had once broken those of style, has proved too much for the squeamish. This was the Robbe-Grillet who has been lately written about. One imagines he is grinning all the way to hell at one literary journalist's inane observation that because his last book, Un roman sentimental, included graphic descriptions of child rape and incest "he has blown his farewell". Really? Memories are short and taste has changed. It is not just in the Anglo-Saxon countries that publishers have assumed that readers crave "accessibility", that is, being told what they know already. It is not just in the Anglo-Saxon countries that restrictive prudishness and sexual correctness have reasserted themselves.
In the autumn of 1970 I braved the CRS who were out looking for trouble during the trial of the Nanterre rabble-rouser (and, predictably, future minister) Alain Geismar. My destination was a party to which I had been invited by a girl who worked for Les Éditions de Minuit. Robbe-Grillet would be there. And so he was. I got my five nervous minutes, drooling to him as many had drooled before me: the bogusness of omniscient narrators, the necessity of writing in the present tense, the futility of linear narrative and so on. He heard me out, then asked with a delightful smile and his hopeful hands held about 30cm apart: "Just how short are skirts in London this winter?"
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