ABSTRACT
Apart from being second-rate pornography, L’Image projects a view of sexuality that has come to be referred to as ‘sexploitation’. Robbe-Grillet claims that he is fascinated by images and stereotypes, especially those of a popular nature, and this is borne out by his pastiche of the detective story in The Erasers, for example, or of the resistance war film in L’Homme qui ment.. Robbe-Grillet returned to prose fiction with Project for a Revolution in New York in 1970. This time the stereotype is the American gangster story and indeed the whole myth of urban violence in the United States. There is a deliberate irony in talking about ‘revolution’ in a monotonously regular world such as that of New York in the late 1960s – indeed, in a world in which erotic activity of the most sadistic kind, rather than anything remotely resembling revolutionary politics, is at the centre of the book.
