Nouveau roman

Overview

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Alain Robbe-Grillet, an influential theorist as well as writer of the Nouveau Roman, published a series of essays on the nature and future of the novel which were later collected in Pour un Nouveau Roman. Rejecting many of the established features of the novel to date, Robbe-Grillet regarded many earlier novelists as old-fashioned in their focus on plot, action, narrative, ideas, and character. Instead, he put forward a theory of the novel as focused on objects: the ideal nouveau roman would be an individual version and vision of things, subordinating plot and character to the details of the world rather than enlisting the world in their service.^[3]

A group of writers dubbed Nouveaux Romanciers, "new novelists", appeared in the mid-1950s: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Robert Pinget. The style had different approaches but generally rejected the traditional use of chronology, plot and character in fiction, as well as the omniscient narrator. The Nouveau Roman authors were open to influences from writers such as William Faulkner and the cinema. Both Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, whose 1958 novel Moderato cantabile was in the style of the nouveau roman, also contributed to the French New Wave style of filmmaking.^[4]

Alain Robbe-Grillet became an elected member of the Académie française on 25 March 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat No. 32. Claude Simon, the 1985 Nobel laureate in Literature, is often identified with the Nouveau Roman movement.

The Nouveau Roman literary movement and the novels themselves were mainly theorized by Jean Ricardou,^[5] who, in addition to his well-known theoretical works – Problèmes du Nouveau Roman (1967), Pour une théorie du Nouveau Roman (1971), Le Nouveau Roman (1973), Nouveaux problèmes du roman (1978) – also published several nouveaux romans himself: L’Observatoire de Cannes (1961), La Prise de Constantinople (1965, Feneon prize for literature in 1966), Les Lieux-dits, petit guide d’un voyage dans le livre (1969). Besides his own writing, he organized, directed and published the acts of several conferences on the nouveau roman, including the famous 1971 conference and debate at Cerisy, published in two volumes: Nouveau roman : hier, aujourd’hui, indispensable for an understanding of the history of that important period of French literature. Just before his death in 2016, he was working on a book of interviews with Amir Biglari, in which he provides a complete, precise and objective account of the Nouveau Roman movement.

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Authors in the style of the Nouveau Roman

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Central writers and works

The following is based on the list from Les nouveaux romanciers : étude critique as well as La littérature française du XXe siècle.^[6]^[7]

Samuel Beckett: Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), The Unnamable (1953)
Maurice Blanchot: Thomas the Obscure (1941; revised 1950)
Michel Butor: Passing Time (1956), Changing Track (1957)
Jean Cayrol: Foreign Bodies (1959)
Marguerite Duras: Moderato Cantabile (1958), The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964)
Louis-René des Forêts: The Bavard (1946)
Claude Mauriac: The Dinner Party (1959), The Marquise Went Out at Five (1961)
Claude Ollier: The Mise-en-Scène (1958), Law and Order (1961)
Robert Pinget: Graal Flibuste (1956), Monsieur Levert (1959), The Inquisitory (1962)
Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Erasers (1953), The Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957)
Nathalie Sarraute: Martereau (1953), The Planetarium (1959), The Golden Fruits (1963)
Claude Simon: The Wind (1957), The Grass (1958), The Flanders Road (1960)

Parallel and later figures (1960s)

France

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio: The Interrogation (1963)
Georges Perec: Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965)
Jean Ricardou: L'Observatoire de Cannes (1961), La Prise de Constantinople (1965)
Philippe Sollers: The Park (1961)
Monique Wittig: The Opoponax (1964)

Canada

Hubert Aquin: Next Episode (1965)^[8]
Gérard Bessette: Not for Every Eye (1960), Incubation (1965)^[8]
Jacques Godbout: L'Aquarium (1962)^[8]

United Kingdom

Christine Brooke-Rose: Out (1964), Such (1966)^[9]^[10]^[11]
B. S. Johnson: Trawl (1966), The Unfortunates (1969)^[12]^[11]
Ann Quin: Berg (1964)^[11]

Italy

Italo Calvino: Cosmicomics (1965)^[13]

Argentina

Julio Cortázar: Cronopios and Famas (1962), 62: A Model Kit (1968)^[13]

United States

The critic Benjamin Libman has argued that the Nouveau Roman exerted a profound influence upon Susan Sontag and the development of postmodern fiction in the United States.^[14]

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The Nouveau Roman and the Left Bank

The Nouveau Roman style also left its mark on the screen as writers Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet became involved with the Left Bank film movement (often labelled as part of the French New Wave). Their collaboration with director Alain Resnais resulted in critical successes such as Hiroshima mon amour (1958) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). They would later go on to direct their own films.^[15]

Influenced by these films, French courses in North America during the 1960s and 1970s often included works by Nouveau Roman authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie (1957), Michel Butor's La Modification (1957), Nathalie Sarraute's Le Planetarium (1957) and Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile (1958).^{[citation needed]}