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The Replacement | Introduction

‘‘The Replacement’’ by Alain Robbe-Grillet was collected with other sketches and published in 1962 under the title Instantanes (translated as Snapshots). ‘‘The Replacement,’’ along with the other sketches in Snapshots, is a classic text of the New Novel movement, which originated in France in the 1950s. The movement was made up of a group of writers that included Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, Marguerite Duras, and Michel Butor. These writers rejected literary traditions of plot, action, narrative, and characterization in their works, and created a new literary form that presented an objective record of objects. As the movement quickly became popular throughout the literary world, Robbe-Grillet became its most famous writer and spokesperson.

‘‘The Replacement,’’ an intricate interweaving of three plot lines, continually confounds readers’ efforts to piece together a coherent and definitive explanation, which is exactly the goal of the writers of the New Novel movement. Their point is that authors should not impose meaning on a literary work, that instead readers should be left to decide for themselves how to come to an understanding of it.

The plot of ‘‘The Replacement’’ centers on the interaction between a frustrated teacher and his bored students, the story they are reading in class, and a schoolboy just outside the classroom window. Seen as a whole, the sketch becomes a fascinating statement on the philosophy of this innovative movement, offering an exploration of how to ‘‘read’’ a text.

The Replacement Summary

The narrative weaves together three separate scenes. The first involves a schoolboy who is standing by a tree, peering intently at something in the branches. He repeatedly tries to reach a branch that seems within his grasp. After failing to grasp it, he lowers his arm, appears to give up, and continues to stare at something in the leaves. He then returns to the foot of the tree and resumes the same position he took at the beginning of the story. The narrator describes the position of the boy’s body as he peers up at the branches. He holds a book satchel in one hand while the other hand is obscured, probably because he is using it to balance himself against the tree. His face is pressed to the tree and turned in such a way that it would not be visible to an observer. The boy scrutiT nizes something unidentifiable about a yard and a half above the ground.

The narrative then shifts to the second scene, which is inside a classroom. There a boy who has been reading aloud suddenly pauses, probably, the narrator concludes, because he has come to a period. The boy makes an effort, which is not described, to indicate that he is at the end of a paragraph. Here the narrative abruptly shifts to a one-sentence description of the schoolboy outside changing his position so that he can ‘‘inspect the bark of the tree higher up.’’

Back in the classroom, the other children are whispering. When the schoolmaster... » Complete The Replacement Summary