ABSTRACT
Robbe-Grillet’s novels remain radical, and his writings of the 1950s and early 1960s are of abiding interest. They were collected in Towards a New Novel, of which Martin Seymour-Smith has said that it gathers together into one polemic ‘nearly all the concerns of fictional modernism’, and Frank Kermode that it is ‘one of the important contributions to the theory of the novel’. As for film, Robbe-Grillet has always been fascinated by ‘its subjective and imaginative possibilities’. It is a familiar convention of the cinema that the sound-track can carry a different part of the narrative from that actually appearing on the screen (the hero’s car can be seen driving away while the heroine is still heard sobbing over his departure, for example). But Robbe-Grillet takes the practice much further than usual, and is able in The Immortal One to play music on the sound-track which evokes a mood relevant to a quite different time from that shown on the screen.
