Textual Labyrinths: Robbe-Grillet’s Antinarrative Aesthetics

Abstract

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.