Issue 99, Spring 1986
When in Paris, Alain Robbe-Grillet lives in a third-floor apartment in an affluent residential area on the edge of the city, across the street from the woods of the Bois de Boulogne. You cross two courtyards to reach his building, where the spacious sitting-room overlooks flower-beds and pots. It is extremely tranquil, furnished simply, with black and red the predominant colors, plenty of comfortable sofas and chairs, and piles of books everywhere. Robbe-Grillet comes to Paris for business (he is director of the publishing firm Les Editions de Minuit, his own publishers) and to see friends, but he writes in his large country house in Normandy, where he spends as much time as he can.
Alain Robbe-Grillet's first two novels, The Erasers (1953) and The Voyeur (1955), were ignored by the public and dismissed by the critics. But his third and most famous novel, Jealousy (1957), was enthusiastically reviewed by Roland Barthes—already one of the most serious and influential voices in Parisian literary circles—who called it “objective,” giving the word Littré dictionary's definition as “turned toward the object.” From then on, the word was used to designate a group of novelists working along the same lines: Michel Butor, Claude Ollier, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, and Nathalie Sarraute. Though varied in age, personality, and style, they shared certain preoccupations, chiefly a questioning of the old and the search for a new form of récit—narrative. In a series of essays published in L’Express magazine and later in a book entitled For A New Novel (1963), Robbe-Grillet outlined the ideas and methods of the New Novelists; he became the spokesman of the movement. With the international success of Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad, for which he wrote the script, Robbe-Grillet’s reputation increased, and his books began to sell. He made his own films and wrote many more novels in the years that followed, becoming a favorite on American campuses. He now spends one term every year at an American university.
At the beginning of 1985, Robbe-Grillet’s autobiography, The Mirror That Returns, appeared amid publicity and controversy, becoming an instant bestseller. That the spokesman of the “objective novel” should indulge in an eminently subjective exercise, an autobiography, seemed a provocation. Yet the book is vintage Robbe-Grillet, characteristically mixing fact and fiction, memory and imagination.
INTERVIEWER
You have just published your autobiography, The Mirror That Returns. Are you pleased with the response?
ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET
It has been received better than any of my other books, in the sense that it has become a best-seller. Usually my books are long-sellers, that is to say they sell in much greater numbers than many a best-seller, but over a long period. The impact of this one has been immediate. As a result I have trouble assessing its reception because the reviews are full of contradictions. Some people have liked the autobiographical side, the description of family life. Some have appreciated the new way of speaking about the German occupation—the relationship of the French people with the occupiers—simply and without makeup. My parents were Germanophile. Well, they were Germanophile—so what? I don’t hide it. I don’t try to justify or condemn it—I tell the story. And this had never been done before.
INTERVIEWER
Some people like the theory of literature contained in the book above all.
ROBBE-GRILLET
Indeed! Which is the continuation of what is in my novels and my theoretical works. None of these points is indifferent to me, at the same time none really interests me. What does interest me is the weaving of all these different elements in the book; the way they mix in movement, constantly shifting and changing, as if they were fragments of me. When I think of myself, I feel that I am made up of fragments in which there are childhood memories, fictional characters I particularly care about—such as Henri de Corinth—and even characters who belong to literature and with whom I feel I have family ties. Stavrogin of The Possessed and Madame Bovary are related to me exactly as my grandfather is, or my aunt. So it is the way all these figures move and refuse to be fixed that excites me. Well, at least that is what I say today. Another day I might say something different!
INTERVIEWER
Henri de Corinth appears in several of your novels and now in your autobiography, where he is a family friend. Is he based on someone you knew?
ROBBE-GRILLET
I almost think that I have known him in real life; at the same time I can believe that my grandfather is someone I have invented. All these characters, whether real or imagined, make up the content of my imaginary world. It doesn’t matter which has been born of experience and which belongs to the imagination. I would be sad if I had to differentiate—I don’t live like that. But I can tell you how I arrived at his name. Goethe has a ballad called The Financée of Corinth. It is based on a famous Greek legend in which a man falls in love with a very beautiful, pale, slim girl; but he can’t get close to her. “You must first ask my father’s permission,” she says. So he travels to Corinth, her home town, finds her house and knocks on the door. But the girl’s mother informs him that their daughter has died many years ago. However, it is a dark, cold night and they give him shelter, putting him in their daughter’s room. During the night the girl comes and lies beside him and sucks his blood. In the morning he is found dead, with a wound on his neck. This ballad of Goethe’s is used by Michelet in his novel The Witch, in which a chapter is called “La Fiancée de Corinth.” There is an ambiguity here: “the fiancée of Corinth” could mean either that the girl comes from Corinth or that she is Corinth’s fiancée. My character, Henri de Corinth, is born out of this ambiguity. I have often said that my memories tend to become engravings, say by Honoré Daumier. I see with precision a scene I am trying to depict, and at the same time I see an engraving: a room with a large Napoleon III bed, and a young woman leaning over a child. Now in The Mirror That Returns I write, “My mother often watched over my troubled sleep with a paraffin lamp.” I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of “real” life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.
INTERVIEWER
Do you mean that memory is imagination, that we invent our own life in retrospect or indeed as we go along?
ROBBE-GRILLET
Exactly. Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer that records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention. In other words, inventing a character or recalling a memory is part of the same process. This is very clear in Proust: For him there is no difference between lived experience—his relationship with his mother, and so forth—and his characters. Exactly the same type of truth is involved.
INTERVIEWER
There is a very moving scene in The Mirror that illustrates your point: Henri de Corinth rides in the sea and nearly drowns in order to capture a mirror that is floating on the water and which recedes as he advances. It is a story within the story, what André Gide called mise-en-abime. Did you deliberately choose this method?
ROBBE-GRILLET
I never choose anything deliberately. I make references to all sorts of things—for example, to a novel by the Persian writer Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl. It seems an opposition to the Cartesian spirit; yet Descartes wrote, “If I dream of something with enough power, when I wake up I don’t know whether it was a dream or reality.” So you see, Descartes confers the same truth-status to a dream, if he has dreamed with enough power to turn it to reality.
INTERVIEWER
But surely this is a far cry from your theories of the “New Novel,” in which reality has to be depicted exactly, to its minutest detail?
ROBBE-GRILLET
It seems to be the opposite of what has been said about the New Novel in general and my work in particular. But I have been protesting against the idea of “objectivity” for thirty years. I have stated that I never describe something that exists in reality: I don’t look at a landscape or an engraving and then describe it. There is an engraving in my novel In the Labyrinth called The Defeat of Rischenfelt. Everyone believes that I have had this engraving in my hand. But never! Everything in my novels is pure invention. It may be seen with the precision of something that is there, in front of my eyes, but it never is! If it were, I would not wish to describe it. It is in my brain and not in front of my eyes. During the first years of my work people always wrote, “Robbe-Grillet means objectivity, the scientific eye.” Perhaps, but the scientific eye is looking at what is in the imagination.
INTERVIEWER
If you have something in mind that you wish to describe, it means that you have something to say. Yet you have argued vigorously against the idea that a writer ever has, or should have, anything to say.
ROBBE-GRILLET
When a novelist has “something to say,” they mean a message. It has political connotations, or a religious message, or a moral prescription. It means “commitment,” as used by Sartre and other fellow-travelers. They are saying that the writer has a world view, a sort of truth that he wishes to communicate, and that his writing has an ulterior significance. I am against this. Flaubert described a whole world, but he had nothing to say, in the sense that he had no message to transmit, no remedy to offer for the human condition.
INTERVIEWER
But did Dostoyevsky have nothing to say? Tolstoy?
ROBBE-GRILLET
Tolstoy yes. That is why on the whole he doesn’t interest me.