Alain Robbe-Grillet, a twentieth-century French author and filmmaker, is the chief inventor of the 1950s and 1960s literary style or genre known as the New Novel” (Nouveau Roman). The purpose of the artistic movement was to redefine the aesthetic of a literary work of art by shifting away from traditional mimesis or representation. Robbe-Grillet’s goal throughout his oeuvre is to enliven reader responses by allowing audiences to interpret things for themselves.

Robbe-Grillet’s work is challenging, if not downright off-putting to some readers. Methodical, detailed, and often repetitive descriptive accounts of objects replace (and often reveal) the psychology of his human characters. When reading a New Novel, one must slowly assemble the narrative events or plot. The new novelists’ techniques resemble the experience of psychoanalysis, in which deeper unconscious meanings are uncovered in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured, and the resulting novel resembles the literary equivalent of a cubist painting.

Ultimately, Robbe-Grillet’s work is characterized by its tendency to mean many different things to many different people. In this way, his approach to mimesis is fundamentally different from Aristotle’s, which was to focus on aspects of thought, character, and narrative to tell stories. The New Novel insists that humanity is merely one part of a large, diverse, and at times mysterious world.