ABSTRACT
Ghosts in the Mirror (1985) is a hodgepodge of a book, different from any of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s previous writings. The first in his three-volume, purportedly autobiographical, series entitled Romanesques (an overall title nonetheless emphasizing fiction and storytelling), the book exhibits a prose in which author abandons the chilling (perhaps indeed ultimately deceptive) objectivity of The Erasers (1953), The Voyeur (1955), and Jealousy (1957). So-called “real” recollections are interwoven with more or less “realistic” narratives about one Henri de Corinthe, a somber, enigmatic figure from Robbe-Grillet’s childhood—unless Count Henri’s story is pure make-believe, a possibility that the reader must also consider. The writer (1922–2008) summarizes his project as “an autobiography…conscious of its inherent incapacity to constitute itself as one, conscious of the fictions that necessarily traverse it, of the shortcomings and aporias that undermine it, of the reflexive passages that break up the anecdotal movement, and perhaps, in a word, conscious of its unconsciousness.”
