Textual labyrinths
Robbe-Grillet's antinarrative aesthetics
pp. 31-52
in: , The narrative turn in fiction and theory, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
When Dans le labyrinthe appeared in 1959, the French cultural world was engaged in an intense debate on the nature and future of the novelistic genre. Robbe-Grillet was considered to be the leading figure and spokesman of a new literary school, the nouveau roman, which vigorously attacked the assumption that in the novel someone narrates someone's story and provides a narrative interpretation of the world. In our times, he declared, "to tell a story has become strictly impossible'; allegedly, the nouveau roman replaces individual characters with "a banal he, anonymous and transparent, the simple subject of the action expressed by the verb' (FNN: 27, 33). In this chapter I shall unearth this antinarrative aesthetics — a poetics that emphasizes textual construction, the exploration of new literary forms and the reader's critical engagement with the assumptions underlying the view of the novel as a mode of storytelling.