In this blog post, we’ll explore how Robbe-Grillet’s experimental writing and the Nouveau Roman movement shook up traditional realism and humanism, leading him to a symbolic position despite his conflict with the literary establishment.
Robe-Grillet, Spokesperson for the Nouveau Roman
From the moment he first set foot in the French literary world, Alain Robe-Grillet provoked intense and at times almost hateful rejection; he is an author who has consistently stirred controversy in French literature and culture for the past half-century. When he first appeared on the scene, some saw in his work the image of a mentally ill patient, while others likened him to a “murderer” in reference to his plan to break with the legacy of 19th-century fiction. At the time, many misunderstood the literary revolution he attempted as anti-humanism, a rejection of humanity, or even something inhuman; however, his goal was to reject the modern bourgeoisie’s beliefs in morality, consistency, homogeneity, and order, and to view humanity anew within the context of a new era and a new framework of understanding.
His work was underpinned by a fundamental disillusionment with modern civilization. The two world wars—and particularly the Nazi crimes against humanity committed in the name of order, purity, and goodwill during World War II, along with the tacit complicity in them—shattered trust in the established values that French society had long upheld. Once the legitimacy of the mode of existence that God had bestowed upon humanity had collapsed of its own accord, humans came to experience a sense of surplus and the incomprehensible absurdity of existence; this pessimism led to disillusionment with the modern conception of humanity and a rejection of the legacy of anthropocentrism.
Robbe-Grillet did not act alone. Standing at the forefront of a group of writers who, though not forming an official school, were shaping a “movement,” he represented their shared determination to introduce into literature changes analogous to the aesthetic transformations occurring in contemporary music and art through a reexamination of the novel form. Since Balzac’s realism, which emerged in France in the first half of the 19th century, had persisted without significant change for over a century, their task was to put an end to the old realism and seek a mode of novel-writing befitting the new era. Balzac was cited as a symbolic scapegoat in this process of rejection.
The so-called “new” group of novelists, gathered under the banner of the “anti-novel” and centered around the Minuit publishing house, formed the category known as the “nouveau roman” and advocated a new realism that depicted a new reality through a fresh vision of humanity. Their common goal ultimately lay in the prospects of writing itself and was pursued through the “adventure of writing,” which prioritized form over content. For them, the writer’s involvement was the act of writing itself, sparked by a fierce creative spirit, and they rejected narratives based on traditional characterization and psychological causality.
Their work pushed the anti-novel movement, which had been ongoing since the early 20th century, to its extreme; writers such as Beckett, William Faulkner, and James Joyce—who were unrelated to the French literary tradition—exerted a significant influence on French authors, alongside Flaubert, Sartre, and Camus. Given that French literature had traditionally emphasized psychological analysis and the clarity of the French language, this demonstrates just how radical the stylistic innovations of the Nouveau Roman were. Furthermore, one cannot overlook the innovative and unwavering conviction of publisher Jérôme Lindon, who secretly founded the Minuit publishing house during the German occupation, which served as a crucial foundation for this movement.
Over time, the authors of the Nouveau Roman gradually gained recognition for their consistent body of work, secured a readership, and achieved fame. Claude Simon won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1985), which was seen as a tribute to the entire group of French writers active within the Nouveau Roman movement. Nathalie Sarraute also received a certain degree of recognition from the literary establishment, including her inclusion in Gallimard’s ‘La Pléiade’ series. Robbe-Grillet himself attracted worldwide attention as an iconic figure representing contemporary French literature and a figure who left his mark on the development of cinema; he was particularly active as a lecturer in the United States. Although he was elected a “permanent member” of the Académie Française in 2004, he maintained a cynical attitude toward the literary establishment and never sought to reconcile his “nonconformist” worldview with it. Until his death at the age of 86, he maintained his status as an “inappropriate” maverick.
The True Nature of the Literary Adventure
His winning of the Critics’ Prize in 1955 for ‘The Voyeur’ sparked a fierce controversy known as the “Querelle du Voyeur,” which split the French literary world in two. This was an extreme clash between the established literary generation—including members of the Académie Française and senior literature professors at the Sorbonne—and a new generation of critics such as Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot; it was a clash between the old and the new that would go down in the history of French literature. His award was interpreted as more than a mere personal victory; it was seen as a triumph for a new kind of literature. His work was hailed as a groundbreaking piece that opened a new chapter in modern French literature, continuing the tradition of viewing literature as an art form that creates a unique world through language.
So, what exactly did people criticize about Robbe-Grillet’s novel? Conversely, what were the narrative characteristics that so captivated the new generation of critics? First, he set his story within an ambiguous chronology. While many viewed this indeterminacy as hindering immediate comprehension, it was essentially an expression of distrust in the fleeting temporality perceived by consciousness. This was a practice of “new realism” aimed at depicting the fissure between consciousness and the world, the discontinuity and inconsistency of consciousness—valid only in the present moment of thought—and the rupture between consciousness and the continuous, unconscious flow of time. His project was an experiment that pushed the work attempted by Proust and Joyce to even greater extremes; it was not an arbitrary act of violence against tradition, but rather a logical continuation of processes that had begun earlier.
By distrusting consciousness as a firmly established agent of action, he was compelled to deny humanity’s ability and right to control the world. The world, others, and objects “simply exist there,” just as the subject “I” does. According to Robgrie, humans must abandon the narcissistic illusion that they are the center of the world and adopt a phenomenological attitude of viewing things as they are. Skepticism regarding the consistency and centripetal force of consciousness implies the dissolution of causal relationships between the external world and humans, and the absence of a hero in his novels is explained precisely within this context.
In Robgrillet’s writing, there are neither heroes nor anti-heroes, nor protagonists in the traditional sense. Characters serve merely as vehicles for voices and gazes, and his “flat” style of writing—which excludes psychological depth and metaphorical profundity—can be characterized, above all, as object-centered writing. This was precisely why the older generation felt uncomfortable. They found it difficult to accept the way he stripped psychology and humanism from the text and, like a forensic scientist, reconstructed objects and their positions, making them omnipresent throughout the text. However, this approach was also an expression of rigorous observation of a neutral, material reality that deliberately excluded references to subjective or symbolic meaning.
This new realism, which began with a rejection of romantic depth, resembled classical realism on the surface but took the realism first attempted by Flaubert to its extreme. Many viewed him as a mechanical revolutionary who sought to banish humanity from literature and perceived his work as an attempt to exclude the author from the book; yet Robgrie’s emergence represented a seamless continuation of the major currents of French literature, unfolding them in a different way.
Robgrie’s Descriptions and the Difficulty of Reading
Thus, even though his novels display an unprecedented new character, his approach was by no means an entirely unfamiliar endeavor. Yet why did people feel so uncomfortable when he first appeared?
Robgrie’s objective descriptions, despite their meticulousness and precision, present us with a mysterious world that is by no means easy to understand. It appears to be devoid of motive and entirely unrelated to the characters’ actions; paradoxically, however, the hyper-realistic setting constructs a fictional world completely detached from the external world, pushing readers into an ambiguous labyrinth.
Furthermore, upon close observation, each scene reveals itself to be a repetition of another scene with very subtle modifications. Certain objects or images—such as a rope coiled into a figure-eight shape, traces of a ring found on the pier, or a cigarette pack floating on the surface of the sea—appear repeatedly, sometimes unchanged and sometimes in slightly modified forms, leading readers to speculate that they must hold some meaning, or at least serve some function.
Yet the relationship between these scenes is not immediately apparent. These repetitive descriptions feel both familiar and strangely unfamiliar, vaguely evoking an ambiguous, fantastical world. The writing, centered on objective and literal descriptions, intensely evokes highly subjective fantasies of desire—and it is precisely at this point that the text’s difficulty arises.
The gaze that keeps returning to the same object paradoxically reveals that, no matter how meticulously the object is dissected, it is impossible to ascribe a single, fixed identity or meaning to it that would be truly satisfying. The moment one intuits that no seamless, logical relationship can exist between objects and humans, that gaze can never feel a perfect sense of oneness with the external world.
His principle of distancing—which calls for abandoning the romantic and tragic sentiment of trying to overcome such disconnection and impose meaning—stemmed from an intuitive experience of disconnection from the external world. Here, the gaze directed at the object can be described as the gaze of a stranger cast into the world.
However, that gaze directed at the object is by no means an “eye-camera” that merely replicates the object as it is. A gaze fixated on objects that are nothing but alien is already an expression of the desire to question their meaning; when objects encounter the subjective gaze, they become the stage for unconscious fantasy, undergoing microscopic transformations and distortions driven by invisible desires.
That desire remains thoroughly hidden behind the camera, never explicitly confessed on the surface of the text, but only vaguely implied in the act of reading. Thus, while his hyperrealistic depictions may at first glance seem to present an all-too-ordinary world composed of fixed, immutable objects, they in fact lure readers into a strange and unsettling world of fantasy where meaning constantly flees beyond the horizon of consciousness. The most objective and superficial materiality serves as the conduit for the expression of the most intimate subjectivity.
Surrealism, Freud, and Their Manifestation in “The Voyeur”
Viewed in this light, one can surmise what problem Robgrie’s work raises for readers. It is the undeniable problem of subjectivity—arising from the very product of objectivist and hyperrealist writing—that emerges during the reading process.
The reason critics long hesitated to acknowledge subjectivity in Robgrie’s writing was not because they failed to sense it in his work. Despite Robgrie’s admission that his novels aim for total subjectivity, critics spoke of subjectivity solely to accuse him of not remaining faithful to his own theory.
This error can be attributed, in part, to a lack of perspective that would allow for an understanding of subjectivity as an integral part of his writing. However, in a sense, it also stemmed from his ambivalent and paradoxical attitude toward Freudian theory. Although he held quite sophisticated views on Freudian psychoanalysis, he constantly emphasized the importance of maintaining a distance from all kinds of transcendent values—whether metaphysical, psychological, or psychoanalytic.
This does not mean, however, that he lacked an aesthetic interest in Freud’s theories. It was simply a confession of his belief that a novel should be the creation of a new world rather than a reproduction of existing perceptions or values, and we must view his writing from two seemingly entirely different perspectives—one phenomenological and the other psychoanalytic.
To this end, it is necessary to briefly touch upon the influence he received from the Surrealists. The Surrealists were pioneers in the literary exploration of Freud’s theory of dreams. Robgrie’s stance toward them is clear. What distinguishes him from them is precisely the principle of automatic writing—the belief that one must suppress all conscious control and maintain a completely passive attitude toward unconscious impulses.
The Surrealists’ principle of automatic writing and their indifference to rational thought carried an aspect that rejected art as a deliberate act. In contrast, Robgrie sought to distance himself from them by emphasizing literature as art and practicing the most conscious and calculated form of writing.
Nevertheless, it is clear that he owes a debt to Surrealism. From the Surrealist Joe Busque, who remained on the fringes of the movement, Robgrie learned a dedication to art and a systematic approach to research. Amid the sharp contrast between the nocturnal regime—a descent into the world beneath consciousness—and the diurnal regime—where artistic reconstruction takes place—he believed that aesthetic creation and intellectual, conscious work must necessarily accompany the very boundaries of automatic writing.
This perspective suggested to him that a purely phenomenological perception—merely acknowledging that objects “are there”—fails to reveal the possibility of objects forming connections with emotional life. Just as familiar yet strange objects in a dream attest to the existence of the desiring subject, he saw the potential for objects to function in a similar way within the space of the novel.
Ultimately, arranging objects throughout the fictional space through objective writing is a strategy to create a certain fantastical meaning using objects that exist independently of the characters’ psyches within that fictional space. In this context, it is more valid to understand the character not as the archetypal persona to whom that fantasy is attributed, but as the central axis of a narrative in which the entire text is organized as a single fictional and fantastical space.
If traditional novels based on psychological analysis presupposed a belief in depth, Robgrie’s fictional world reconstructs the depth of the human psyche—that is, vertical fault lines—into a discontinuous plane through the meticulous interlocking of discontinuous objects. This is the core element that renders his fictional world fantastical.
Reconstructing Crime: A Puzzle of Reality and Fantasy — How the writing principles discussed so far were embodied in the novel ‘The Voyeur’ is a sensitive issue. This is because writing is not a simple application of theory but a complex practice that mobilizes the author’s entire being.
For example, the title the author originally set as ‘The Traveler’ was changed to ‘The Voyeur’ following discussions with the publisher. Although discussions of his object-centered writing had already been explored in Roland Barthes’ analysis of the previously published ‘Rubber Eraser’, the revised title—combined with the novel’s hyperrealistic descriptive techniques—tended to skew the reading experience toward a purely visual perspective.
However, the novel begins with three ship’s horns, and the sounds of waves—both large and small—and moans heard throughout the text serve as catalysts for a phantasmal effect that evokes sexual violence. One cannot fully appreciate this novel without acknowledging the richness of its sounds—in this regard, the Korean language, with its abundance of onomatopoeia, possesses a unique charm that highlights the world of sound.
Furthermore, the surging movement of the water and the clouds that erase the lines of shadows break down boundaries and challenge hyperrealistic depictions. Nevertheless, this work is regarded as an outstanding example that very successfully embodies the writing principles discussed earlier.
Even by examining just one characteristic strategy in this novel, one can fully grasp its achievement. The repetition of geometric shapes—circles, squares, cones, and the figure-eight shape, which appears repeatedly either implicitly or explicitly—exemplifies object-centered writing. These shapes recur as objects to which no predetermined symbolic value can be assigned, thereby reinforcing the text’s fantastical quality.
Moreover, the figure-eight shape was inspired by Bernoulli’s lemniscate curve, a concept Robgrie, who had knowledge of advanced mathematics, drew upon. The graph of that equation is not limited to a simple horizontal figure-eight; depending on the interrelationships among its components, it forms two circles symmetrical about the y-axis, a “3”-shaped figure stacked vertically along the x-axis, or an ellipse or circle centered at the origin.
What is even more remarkable is that, much like a Möbius strip where the inner and outer surfaces meet as it twists into a figure-eight shape, the figure-eight-shaped island topography weaves together illusions as it follows the horizontal movement of Matthias’s external space. The repetition and transformation of these geometric images create a puzzle in which reality and fantasy intertwine throughout the novel.
In short, what Robgrie aims to create is, first and foremost, a thoroughly neutral and hyperrealistic literary space. In a world constructed with the meticulous objectivity of a mathematician and a geometer, objects escape anthropocentric determinism, and descriptions hold significance solely in and of themselves, without participating in the construction of the plot. Amid this primacy of objects and descriptions, characters are no longer the masters of the world; they merely serve to cast their voices and gazes upon it. Matthias, the character who wanders through the heart of the novel, has been deprived of any of the elements traditionally considered to constitute a human being—such as age, surname, or appearance—and this absence holds no significance whatsoever within the work. He is a traveler who has come to an island to spend half a day selling his wristwatch, and the place appears to be where he was born. Thus, the characterization is little more than a rough sketch. In contrast, the world he enters becomes the subject of meticulous observation by an indeterminate gaze. So, is Matthias—or is the narrator—truly a “peeping tom”? Is it a real scene? Or is it a fantastical scene unfolding in an imaginary world?
The story can be summarized as Matthias’s movement through space and inventory check, as he finds himself in a desperate situation where he must sell all the watches he has left before boarding the ferry back to the mainland that same afternoon. He begins his work at the houses in the harbor. He then rents a bicycle and, following a prearranged plan, systematically combs through the island, dividing it into sections. The story follows him step by step, recounting the moments of movement and stillness in which reality and imagination intertwine. Nevertheless, a gap suddenly appears in such a thorough account: Matthias’s whereabouts for about an hour remain obscure. What did he do after turning off the path toward the cliff instead of going to Marek’s farmhouse? The novel will reveal nothing about this mystery. However, the narrative can no longer follow its normal course. Everything was told before the gap, and after the gap—though coincidentally, the blank page between Parts 1 and 2 in the original manuscript is, as it happens, page 88 — the story begins anew. Matthias, or the narrator, attempts to bridge the gap between what came before and what follows as closely as possible to eliminate that jarring void. But it is too late. The gap sucks in all the readers’ attention, and they become captivated by the obsessive fantasy it evokes.
From this point on, Matthias constantly reconstructs his day in an attempt to fill that void. Thrown into confusion, he misses the returning boat and is forced to spend the night on the island. The next day, the mutilated naked body of young Jacqueline is discovered at the bottom of a cliff. Did the child fall to her death? Or was she murdered? In this situation, Matthias appears to the reader to be acting as if he were the murderer. His reconstruction of the past comes across as an anxious effort to establish an alibi. Moreover, Matthias even returns to the cliff to remove any circumstantial evidence he might have left behind. But did he really commit a crime? Could his memories of the cliff—his obsessions—be illusions sustained and prolonged by the world around him? How many times during his journey did he pull out that scrap of newspaper—the one that always peeked out whenever he took out his wallet, the one that provided absolutely no information about the crime? Could it be that his obsession with establishing an alibi actually contains an imaginary reconstruction of the crime?
Yet hidden scenes are scattered everywhere, starting from the moment Matthias leaves his home at dawn. The window of a house on Rue Saint-Jacques, a doll with broken and dirty limbs, a female mannequin leaning askew in a store window, a movie poster that suggests some kind of violence, an empty bed with red curtains in disarray, a café waitress who seems terrified, the strangely sadistic atmosphere evoked by the sailor and the young woman, and Violette’s memories—which are indistinguishable from reality or fantasy… All these details, which seem to compose some cruel drama, evoke scenes of crime outside of chronological order and independent of Jacqueline’s death—perhaps the only reality. That scene—long before it is explicitly highlighted—haunts the narrative like a ghost, drifting here and there through the associations evoked by elements that appear slowly, continuously, and repeatedly. Yet on the island, no one but Matthias is interested in the crime.
In the end, the crime may be nothing more than a gap in time and space. All of Matthias’s efforts—imagined by the reader as those of a murderer—are not about selling watches, but rather about reconstructing the crime and filling the temporal gaps in the record of his own actions. This is because his innocence will be confirmed by forming a seamless, gap-free surface that completes the figure-eight topography of the island’s space and restores the continuity of time.
