On Alain Robbe-Grillet’s "For a New Novel"

Creative writers today may not know what to make of a well-known collection of essays on the state of the contemporary novel that has doubtless been rendered somewhat obsolete by the progression of critical theory of every single Post- over the last few decades. Adding a frank admission of lukewarm public and critical reception to the mix doesn’t strike a bold note in hindsight, either. “My novels have not been received,” confesses Alain Robbe-Grillet in 1955, “upon publication in France, with unanimous enthusiasm; that is putting it mildly.” Of course, Robbe-Grillet in his For a New Novel (1963) is not necessarily writing of the contemporary novel as we Americans know it but the nouveau roman of France about to arrive during the 1960’s and 70’s. That distinction aside, however, I acknowledge Robbe-Grillet’s better intentions. As he is dourly optimistic about overthrowing the perceived irrelevance of a progressive fiction as the New Novel, such as his own semi-notorious and parodied Jealousy, his immediate admission of not being a theoretician may preclude any attempt to elaborate upon and elevate his work, or at least seal it under the big glass dome of “Art for Art’s sake” (though he does qualify that notion in “On Several Obsolete Notions” as being acceptable). It occurs to me, at least, the problems with “style and construction” in the 50’s remain with us in the form of, for instance, David Foster Wallace’s hyper-footnotes as a narrative limn; and For a New Novel, in this respect, hasn’t outlived its usefulness in the creative writing curriculum, at least in its readdressing the crucial problem about novel-writing: those lazy machines (to borrow Umberto Eco’s term) run much lazier when notable instruction manuals like Wallace’s Infinite Jest or, going further back, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans may have no real instructions to follow.

For a New Novel appears to me a small courtesy on Robbe-Grillet’s behalf to help us out, though we will be left to our own devices in the end. If there are any steadfast notions for novel writers which have existed before Robbe-Grillet put pen to paper, his insistence in “The Use of Theory” that “Each novelist, each novel must invent its own form” can be considered one of the more pertinent in the collection—even if this dictum has likely created in America more failed novels resembling Moby-Dick at its worst instead of anything from the repertoire of vintage Faulkner. Following this in “A Future For The Novel” with literary experimenters as the “the heirs of a tradition”—a problematic suggestion, to be sure—one may be so inclined, despite Robbe-Grillet’s sluggish reader response, to see a bright, rosy future anyway for a cumbersome literary form that more than a few claim died somewhere in the twentieth century. I think Robbe-Grillet’s fashioning of the New Novel as “exploration, not theory” does fit sensibly into the modernist progression of the American novel at least; yet, at the conclusion of these explorations, should writers be in some way make themselves the theoreticians Robbe-Grillet claims they cannot, particularly if they are academic creative writers? Do these writers have a professional if not creative responsibility to implement theory and later explain their novels with it? Since Robbe-Grillet insists “the function of art is never to illustrate a truth... known in advance, but to bring into the world certain interrogations not yet known as such to themselves” (which I can certainly agree with), I imagine his positing serves up more benefits to creative writers outside of academe rather than those who are in it; but, for the latter group, leaving themselves only with “an interplay of agreement and oppositions” may seem an unsatisfactory avenue to revisit with post-modernism’s seemingly endless bounty of texts and meta-texts to draw upon and potentially scatter all over the page.

Robbe-Grillet spends the remainder of these essays tackling the conventions of fiction, sometimes revising his major points along the way, breaking it up with close-ups of master practitioners Italo Svevo, Samuel Beckett, and others. There are any number of instances where he waxes ever-so-close to theory, and such sensible notions as how the contemporary novel is most concerned with “private mental structures” of time and how spatial discontinuity dissolves “the trap of the anecdote” in “Time and Description in Fiction Today” become more attractive aspects in this collection to balance out the less-than-enthralling ideas (i.e., “the only possible commitment for the writer is literature”). The New Novel as Robbe-Grillet knew it then may still be a relic of the recent past if the American post-modern novel hasn’t already superceded it; yet insofar as regarding the whole of For a New Novel itself is concerned, the collection's lasting value here, large or small, for developing American writers may not be the possible intellectual engagement or lack thereof in Robbe-Grillet's non-theoretical theorizing but anticipating the fundamental concerns in commencing the framework of their own version of the New Novel.