ABSTRACT
Alain Robbe-Grillet is a lover of the paradox, and so it is perhaps fitting that the concluding remarks of a study of his work should go counter to the general tenor of what has been said. In his first phase Robbe-Grillet undertook almost single-handedly the objective analysis of the situation with which Kafka and Beckett left the novelist. He wrote his immensely influential essays – and, at least at first, somewhat less influential novels – as a direct outcome of this analysis. Around the early 1960s Robbe-Grillet seems himself to have sensed that the type of fiction was finished. There is a gap of six years between the publication of In the Labyrinth, the last novel of the first phase, and The House of Assignation, the first work of what appears as a second phase. Unfortunately there is no young Robbe-Grillet in the offing to challenge him; even past 60 he is still, for better or for worse, the avant-garde.
