ABSTRACT
The writer who has given so many people an uneasy literary conscience is one of the great prose stylists of the French language, and one of the most influential figures on the intellectual landscape in France since the heyday of Sartre and Camus in the 1940s. The ignominious military collapse of France in May 1940 deeply marked people of Robbe-Grillet’s generation – he was nearly 18 at the time – and led them to question the very bases of Sartre’s political commitment to radical politics and Camus’s stoic retreat into a form of tragic humanism. Alain Robbe-Grillet even had an improbable name for a literary person; he was felt to have made a pun on it in Project for a Revolution in New York. The blurb on a 1962 mass-market reprint of Robbe-Grillet’s first published novel made the following comment: The ‘new novel’, which has deeply marked literature of the up-and-coming variety, recognizes in Alain Robbe-Grillet its theorist and trail-blazer.
