[In the following essay, Szanto discusses Robbe-Grillet's philosophical perspective and concept of the “new novel” as delineated in Towards a New Novel. Szanto notes that Robbe-Grillet's theoretical writings have “contributed to the rampant misunderstanding about his fiction.”]

Alone among the novelists discussed here, Alain Robbe-Grillet has published a volume of purposely theoretical writing. Kafka's diaries and letters, certainly not meant for publication, deal with the events, the day-to-day trivialities of his personal life; any information about his art must be carefully culled from them, and then it usually appears as its own kind of parable. Beckett's essays on Joyce and on Proust and his three dialogues with Georges Duthuit, all written before his presently published novels, these ostensibly deal with subjects other than himself; they explain what Beckett has discovered in the works of Joyce, Proust, and several modern painters but do not allow him to elaborate on what he adds to the innovations of those from whom he learned. On the other hand, although Robbe-Grillet's Towards a New Novel (Pour un nouveau roman) contains essays he has written about other people—understanding the tradition is essential if an author wishes to grow from it—the book's primary force arises from its apparently heretical outline for a new kind of novel.

And yet the program the book demands is often little more than a description of fiction already written by Robbe-Grillet's predecessors, Kafka and Beckett. Certainly it contains something more—it contains passages lending themselves to interpretations that infuriated and impressed critical thinking for more than ten years. Perhaps only in retrospect can one see how Robbe-Grillet's essays could be misunderstood while at the same time they presented a plan for novels unrelated to interpretations of his theories by others. For just as each of his novels shows an increased subtlety and comprehension of technique, his theory too develops to a point where it eliminates the confusion imposed on it by such critics as Roland Barthes, who, himself linguistically and scientistically oriented, saw Robbe-Grillet's first two novels (The Erasers [1953] and The Voyeur [1955]) as representing worlds void of human beings except insofar as humans were viewed, much like all objects within the narrative, as things. In the beginning, Robbe-Grillet did not deny this analysis. He could write the novels and sense their importance, but he could not yet abstract and define the theory. So in 1956 he wrote:

Even the least conditioned observer can't manage to see the world around him with an unprejudiced eye. Let us make it quite clear before we go any further that we are not here concerned with that naive preoccupation of subjectivity which so amuses the analysts of the (subjective) soul. Objectivity, in the current meaning of the term—a completely impersonal way of looking at things—is only too obviously a chimera. But it is liberty which ought at least to be possible—but isn't, either. Cultural fringes (bits of psychology, ethics, metaphysics, etc.) are all the time being attached to things and making them seem less strange, more comprehensible, more reassuring. Sometimes the camouflage is total: a gesture is effaced from our minds and its place taken by the emotions that are supposed to have given rise to it …

Although the argument appears to develop into a plea for objectivity in viewing the world, at the same time it admits that such a project is impossible; the inescapability of subjective vision is a dominant note from the beginning. Yet Robbe-Grillet is not talking about his way of seeing the world, but about the world itself; the distinction has become blurred for many of those who follow Barthes's comprehension of Robbe-Grillet's novels and theories.

To no small extent Robbe-Grillet himself has contributed to the rampant misunderstanding about his fiction; at the beginning he was more interested in considering the nature of the external world than he was in discussing the techniques he utilized in viewing that world. His bent led him to adapt to literature the dictum that “the world is neither meaningful nor absurd. It quite simply is … All around us, defying our pack of animistic or domesticating adjectives, things are there.” An explanation about the nature of the world from a novice writer is only natural if, as Robbe-Grillet does, he considers himself to be writing “realistically.” It is even more natural if he is only in the process of developing his theories about art and its relationship to that world: one must first understand what one is describing before finding the tools for that description. In this respect, a writer's theories about his art begin only after he has begun to write novels; the novels must, by definition (even if not in their stress), be about the world. The theory follows the fact of creation despite an author's possible understanding of the theory before he began to write.

Therefore, when Robbe-Grillet maintained the presence of things to be their primary importance, he gave strong argument to those who believed he was going to be working with things in and of themselves. In this early essay, Robbe-Grillet justly claims that the nineteenth-century fictional tradition sees literature as a mode of expression in which the writer defined and delineated his relation to the external world (called by Robbe-Grillet “tragic complicity”) by explaining the world in terms of himself, by finding in the external world correspondences to his own moods and sensibilities. By carefully using the adjective to anthropomorphize and domesticate his environment (a countryside is “austere” or “calm,” depending on the mood to be established), the writer made of it an accomplice for his hero, as well as an accomplice for himself in his attempt to explain his hero. Robbe-Grillet the theorist wished to eliminate such complicity, since ultimately it must eliminate the possibility of any relationship between man and a universe already by definition nonhuman; only the nonrelationship remains, what existentialism calls the gap of absurdity. Robbe-Grillet, not believing that the simple fact of non-connection between man and his environment should be seen pejoratively (absurdly), claimed that a new kind of fiction could develop if the unbridgeable distance between man and his world was accepted as a neutral fact.

Between taking the world as a series of surfaces, which exist in complete freedom from man's domesticating adjectives and have little relevance for man, and taking the world as a unified projection of man's inmost subjective nature (when the heart is clouded so is the sky, the sun comes out when love is rediscovered—or vice versa, if irony is intended), there is the middle ground upon which Robbe-Grillet attempts to stand. But by arguing forcibly against the nineteenth-century complicity between man and his universe, Robbe-Grillet sounds as if he is embracing the view expounded by Barthes's chosisme, and evidence for Robbe-Grillet's possible chosiste leanings can be garnered from his 1958 article, “Nature, Humanism and Tragedy,” to which he prefixes a quotation from Barthes. The article itself, however, is thoroughly denied by both his previous and his subsequent fictions, which, although they do take as fact the equality of everything external, cannot free his heroes from a complicity with the external world. No human can perceive the world in a nonhuman way; no center other than a living eye, or at least a perceiving mind, can validly explain its environment.

The complicity between man and the universe need not be tragic, and if it is not it differs already from any view within the novels of the past. The fiction of Robbe-Grillet dismisses, as his theories demand, the old myths of depth whose fictions describe at great length what lies beneath the world's surfaces. Robbe-Grillet makes it clear that for him there is no (human) depth in the external world. But there is a depth to man, a psychology man does not understand, which governs much of his life; that psychology is defined analytically by the manner in which the governing psychology sees the external world and by what it finds appropriate to its glance. Whereas nineteenth-century writers of fiction anthropomorphized the universe, Robbe-Grillet allows his heroes their delineations according to what segments of their universe they choose to see and according to the manner in which they see and understand the segments. The universe remains an accomplice of the consciousness that views it. It is still a humanist's universe; the viewer is no less a victim of his own complicity than he is in the novels of Balzac or of Camus. The great difference, however, and the great contribution of phenomenological fiction, lies in immediacy, in its ability to implicate the reader in the situation of the hero without ever explaining what the situation is. Far from being a scientistic literature, a chosiste fiction, Robbe-Grillet's novels display a relevant realism that keeps them in the tradition of that fiction which is altogether descriptive of human experience.

The shame is that, in his enthusiasm to formulate the boundaries of a new novel, Robbe-Grillet attempted to begin with too much of a clean slate, and, for the earlier critics, everything was erased. In his essay of 1957, “On Some Outdated Notions,” he states that such trappings of the novel as character and plot must be eliminated in the new attempt at writing fiction. Although he claims that plot and character are outdated notions, he himself is working with precisely those two elements of fiction, in a modified form, as were Beckett and Kafka before him; merely his method of approach to these problems has differed from that of the nineteenth-century authors. In Robbe-Grillet's fiction, the emphasis has shifted to a tone that describes the character obliquely by engulfing the whole series of events (plot) within the mood established by the narrative; the whole of a novel is completely relevant to the character about whom the events take place.

Even in the article dealing with tragic complicity, “Nature, Humanism, and Tragedy,” Robbe-Grillet undercuts his theory of man's non-involvement with nature: “… it must be added that the characteristic of humanism, whether Christian or otherwise, is precisely to incorporate everything, including things that may be trying to limit it, or even totally reject it. This may even be said to be one of the most reliable mainsprings of its action.” Here he is, in effect, admitting what he discovers later in his theory and knows already after the appearance of The Voyeur, that one consciousness narrates only what is relevant to itself—nothing else is incorporated. The unity lies in the human consciousness itself, which can relate details relevant only to its own humanity; everything considered by that consciousness is dependent upon it for the kind of existence it will be allowed. Each man is an internalized universe who considers the external world in accordance with his own nature. In this sense, Robbe-Grillet practices precisely what he condemns: his dismissal of the contemporary relevance of nineteenth-century fiction is so broad that he denounces techniques of his own that differ greatly from those of Balzac. Yet, whereas Balzac sought unified external correlatives to explain his characters, Robbe-Grillet's characters pick tiny segments of the external world, which they draw to themselves; these segments give the only available clues to their natures and obsessions. And this is the distinction Robbe-Grillet does not draw.

The difficulty from the beginning lies in a distinction between the consideration of things themselves and the presence of these things. For the presence of a thing is relevant only to the mind that grasps that presence. If this is the distinction Robbe-Grillet was attempting to make, he allowed himself to be misled by the intriguing ideas of Roland Barthes and the praises of Barthes's followers. It would be too much to say that the chosiste critics misinterpreted what Robbe-Grillet was writing about (in his theories), since a sufficient base existed for their attitudes. But Towards a New Novel, as a volume of critical essays, cannot be viewed as base for chosiste interpretations. Robbe-Grillet claims, quite rightly, that the volume presents a collection of essays, thoughts about the novel that have evolved over a period of years. Such a description is quite valid, provided an attempt is not made to draw parallels between the chronological development of his art and of his theory. A further danger lies in forcing his novels into the mold of previous theoretical statements. Robbe-Grillet points out the writer's difficulty in knowing precisely where he is going before he gets there; the work of art evolves as the attitude to it evolves, as the writer works with it. To take a ten-page theory and attempt to fit into it a three-hundred-page novel is a dangerous business; some aspects of the theory will fit the novel, but the novel must, if it is to be of value, contain far more than the theory itself. In his novels themselves Robbe-Grillet warns, indirectly, against the danger of any immediate parallels between objective, that is, theoretical, statements and the “meaning” of the fiction. In The Erasers, Wallas interrogates the concierge and concludes that in his story, filled with details, “It is apparent that the author only reproduces all those trifling remarks out of a concern for objectivity; and despite the care he takes to present what follows with the same detachment, he obviously regards it as much more important.” The words of the concierge, as well as the techniques of the novel, must be seen in their subjective unity.

In the evolution of Robbe-Grillet's theories, there is mounting emphasis on the need for absolute subjectivity to dominate the form and the description of the world perceived. In his 1961 essay, “New Novel, New Man,” he openly proclaimed this subjectivity:

As there are many objects in our books, and as people thought there was something unusual about them, it didn't take long to decide on the future of the word “objectivity,” which was used by certain critics when referring to those objects, but used in very particular sense, i.e. oriented towards the object. In its usual sense which is neutral, cold and impartial, the word becomes an absurdity. Not only is it a man who, in my novels, for instance, describes everything, but he is also the least neutral, and the least impartial of men; on the contrary, he is always engaged in a passionate adventure of the most obsessive type—so obsessive that it often distorts his vision and subjects him to phantasies bordering on delirium. It is also quite easy to show that my novels … are even more subjective than those of Balzac …”

Even if the objects seen appear with hard-edged objectivity, they will be the subjective choices of a psychology enforcing its obsessions onto a conscious and recording mind, and they will be colored by the needs of that mind. For example, the paperweight in the office of Dupont in The Erasers is a harmless object when it is first described: “A kind of cube, but slightly misshapen, a shiny block of gray lava, with its faces polished as though by wear, the edges softened, compact, apparently hard, heavy as gold, looking about as big around as a fist; a paperweight?” But, when Wallas arrives at the end of the narrative to kill Dupont, there is murder in his mind and the same paperweight appears other than it was: “The cube of vitrified stone with its sharp edges and deadly corners, is lying harmlessly between the inkwell and the memo-pad.”

This kind of subjectivity was already present in Robbe-Grillet's first novel. Perhaps as a counterargument, the example of the tomato can be considered. Geometrically described, this slice appears totally objective:

A quarter of tomato that is quite faultless, cut up by the machine into a perfectly symmetrical fruit.

The periphereal flesh, compact, homogeneous, and a splendid chemical red, is of an even thickness between a strip of gleaming skin and the hollow where the yellow, graduated seeds appear in a row, kept in place by a thin layer of greenish jelly along a swelling of the heart. This heart, of a slightly grainy, faint pink begins—toward the inner hollow—with a cluster of white veins, one of which extends toward the seeds—somewhat uncertainly.

Above, a scarcely perceptible accident has occurred: a corner of the skin, stripped back from the flesh for a fraction of an inch, is slightly raised.

But its neither appetizing nor disgusting nature underlines merely what has been made clear earlier, that Wallas is not really hungry, that eating is merely one of the functions he pursues as automatically as the automat where he has chosen to eat carries on its preparation of the food: all the dishes offered, for example, are variations of the basic marinated herring. There is a unified, totally objective center controlling all objects and scenes that appear, binding them to a dominating structure; that point of view of narrating consciousness is human from the first of Robbe-Grillet's novels. Roland Barthes in his introduction to Morrissette's Les Romans de Robbe-Grillet asks the question, “Between the two Robbe-Grillets, Robbe-Grillet no. 1, the ‘chosiste,’ and Robbe-Grillet no. 2, the humanist, between the one portrayed by all the early analysis [established by Barthes himself] and the one portrayed by Bruce Morrissette, must one choose?” The answer must be an emphatic yes.

The link between Robbe-Grillet and the phenomenological theory of Merleau-Ponty especially is constant; in a parallel, rather than influential, relationship, the philosopher and the novelist are working at the same kind of problem with differing tools. In Jealousy, the manner in which A … 's husband sees his wife writing at her desk and the assumptions he must make are filtered through his narrative consciousness: “The shiny black curls tremble slightly on her shoulders as the pen advances. Although neither the arm nor the head seems disturbed by the slightest movement, the hair, more sensitive, captures the oscillations of the wrist, amplifies them, and translates them into unexpected eddies which awaken reddish highlights in its moving mass.” Only the surface is visible, only the details of the surface, and one is not interested in what lies beneath it; the perceiving mind alone establishes the mood. Perhaps A … is terrified, perhaps she is nervous, perhaps impatient—the husband can merely guess, and his mood decides for him. Jealousy, for example, follows the movements of the eye of the narrator, the husband. If he closes his eyes for a moment and an object or a person changes position, then, when his eyes turn back to it, it will seem to have appeared or disappeared suddenly. Robbe-Grillet underscores this movement with the image of a lizard that fascinates the husband: “On the column itself there is nothing to see except the peeling paint and, occasionally, at unforeseeable intervals and at various levels, a greyish-pink lizard whose intermittent presence results from shifts of position so sudden that no one could say where it comes from or where it is going when it is no longer visible.” Or, in The Erasers, when Juard is waiting for Wallas, the apparently confused echoes and re-echoes that will dominate the surface of the later novels are present in the train station: “A tremendous voice fills the hall. Projected by invisible loudspeakers, it bounces back and forth against the walls covered with signs and advertisements, which amplify it still more, multiply it, reflect it, baffle it with a whole series of more or less conflicting echoes and resonances, in which the original message is lost—transformed into a gigantic oracle, magnificent, indecipherable, and terrifying.” With Robbe-Grillet, narrative consciousness is complete. The uncertainty and fear of Kafka have disappeared, the doubts and improbabilities of Beckett have been all but forgotten (they still do hide below the surfaces, disguised beneath such adverbs as doubtless, perhaps, and probably): but experiments with the purity of narrative consciousness, with a fiction in which the central interest is the narrating voice, have begun to bear fruit.

It is obvious that writers other than Kafka and Beckett have left their influence on Robbe-Grillet; both Sartre and Camus work with objects and situations, especially in their respective novels Nausea and The Stranger. As Bruce Morrissette reminds one, Nausea makes constant use of object descriptions. “Roquentin's depiction of a chestnut-tree root was also an object lesson in the ‘être-là; des choses.’” But thereafter comes the difference: “… where Sartre freely employs metaphor and draws intellectual conclusions, Robbe-Grillet rigorously restricts himself to the external object.” With Robbe-Grillet, there is no reflection. Camus, even in Robbe-Grillet's eyes, removes some of the anthropomorphism from fiction; but, though a purer narrative emerges, the domesticating complicity continues to persist. It remains for Robbe-Grillet to cleanse fiction of arbitrary anthropomorphism before he can bring to it description of an external world that delineates the viewer rather than the world. When he speaks of a need to liberate the human glance from the categories that limit its value, he knows he demands the impossible; everything is linked to the entire psychology of the viewer. Therefore all preconditions symptomized by his fiction must be based in a comprehension of this basic limitation; but the proper response must also rise from an awareness of an extremely precise reanthropomorphization with which Robbe-Grillet purposely mars his purified fiction. Robbe-Grillet's heroes undergo exactly that Rorschach test in which most critics of Kafka indulge: among generally geometric (objective) descriptions, edges of cubes that are “murderous” appear. But these descriptions no longer dominate the narrator; they are instead his creation. Complicity still exists between man and the world, but, because the descriptions have become humanly controlled, a great part of the liberation Robbe-Grillet demanded has taken place. Certainly the relation is “humanistic,” and because all distance between himself and the world is controlled by man (as theorist or narrator), the complicity need no longer be tragic. “It can in any case quite obviously only be a question of the world as my point of view orientates it; I shall never know any other. The relative subjectivity of my look serves precisely to define my situation in the world. I simply avoid making common cause with those who turn this situation into a kind of slavery.”