Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1922-2008

From La Belle Captive, 1983

The man who dreamed up the above image (which was shot by the great Henri Alekan) died early today, aged 85, after being hospitalized for a heart ailment. His greatest fame was as a novelist, maybe not even as a novelist but as the putative inventor of the "new novel" (nouvelle roman), which putatively jettisoned plot, character, psychology, all that sort of thing, and replaced them with precise, objective, painstaking description. (Vladimir Nabokov, while a great admirer of Robbe-Grillet's fictions, thought the notion that they were non-and/or-anti-psychological to be ludicrous.) Robbe-Grillet took his work as a filmmaker just as seriously. This work began with his scenario for L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad, which was directed by Alain Resnais in 1962. Robbe-Grillet began directing shortly thereafter, with L'Immortelle in 1962 and Trans-Europ-Express in 1963. Both his novels and his films got, for lack of a better word, kinkier over the years, with plenty of bondage and fluids involved; the hideous sex murders-as-peep-shows in his novel Project for a Revolution in New York do play as violent pornography—exquisitely written violent pornography. Were Robbe-Grillet's convoluted narrative strategies merely subterfuges to excuse what the literary critic Roger Sale called (when writing of another controversial novelist, John Hawkes) a "vile imagination"?

I see I digress. I once asked Leslie Fiedler what he thought of Sale's characterization of Hawkes, and he said he thought the whole concept of a vile imagination was ridiculous. But back to Robbe-Grillet...Georges Perec, himself no slouch at narrative convolutions, was expressing suspicions of this kind well before the work became as explicit as it did. From David Bellos' biography of Perec, describing some of the author's essays of the early '60s:

The "new novel" claimed to present things "as they were", with no involuntary meanings attached; all that could be known about the world, Robbe-Grillet maintained, came from the surface of things.

Not so, Perec declares. Robbe-Grillet had in fact abandoned the true purpose of art in order to represent his personal obsessions. The world of La Jalousie was not "meaningless"; its meanings were merely of limited interest. Rational action was impossible in Robbe-Grillet's universe because the real structure of that universe consisted entirely of the author's sexual fantasies. The "existential despair" of what had passed for left-wing avant-gardism was actually, in Perec's view, a thin veil for subjective, reactionary pessimism.

Of course, one man's subjective, reactionary pessimism is another man's eternal veritas. Perec did not live to read Robbe-Grillet's penultimate novel, Reprise, published in English translation as Repetition, which cites historical precedents of the author's "personal sexual obsessions" and contains, very near the end, this beguiling passage:

In fact there would be someone, both different and the same, the destroyer and the keeper of order, the narrating presence and the traveler...elegant solution to the never-to-be-solved problem: who is speaking here, now? The old words already spoken repeat themselves, always telling the same old story from age to age, repeated once again, and always new...

The man and his work brought up so many ideas, so many arguments, that it's hard to keep pinned down when considering them. (In one of his final interviews, he said, "Resnais is a great technician. But no auteur, no matter what you might think." One could compose a fairly knotty essay, or blog post, on that pronouncement alone.) So I'll note that his film work is criminally difficult to see, or see properly—the Koch-Lorber DVD of Belle Captive, while a noble effort in itself, is not all it can be, and it's pretty much the only subtitled, NTSC video of his directorial work—and that it's in fact far easier to read about. In The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films, he goes on at some length about them all. I'll also note that his wife, Catherine (who came to the Robbe-Grillets' first luncheon with Vladimir and Vera Nabokov dressed as a Lolita-esque gamine) wrote more-utilitarian-than-her-husband's bondage porn under the name Jean deBerg, and one of her works, The Image, was filmed by Radley Metzger and is available on DVD via Synapse Films. And that Raoul Ruiz's casting of Robbe-Grillet as Goncourt in Ruiz's Proust movie Time Regained was one of the wittiest bits of highbrow stunt casting in the history of highbrow stunt casting. And that Robbe-Grillet's "romanesque"/memoir, Ghosts in the Mirror, is a far more companionable and funny volume than his reputation might indicate. And that his final novel, Un Roman Sentimental, created a scandal in France, as did his final film, Gradiva. I wonder if we'll have the opportunities to weigh in on these last two works.

Comments

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Yikes! For a second I thought that was going to be a picture of him....

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Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

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Easier said than done.