The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

An Interview with Alain Robbe-Grillet

Author(s): David Hayman and Alain Robbe-Grillet
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer, 1975), pp. 273-285
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207402
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AN INTERVIEW

WITH

ALAIN

ROBBE-GRILLET

Conducted by David Hayman

The interview took place on June 13, 1973, in Alain Robbe-Grillet's

Paris apartment in a good sized room, conservatively furnished, with
Japanese prints on the walls, a number of well-stocked bookcases, and
books piled randomly on the floor by the windows. Robbe-Grillet
lounged in a corner of his couch behind a long coffee table containing
an odd assortment of books, including one on repressed homosexuality. Though the original topic was to be the most recent novels (Maison de rendez-vous and Project for a Revolution in New York), we
were soon on to other, less obvious topics.
The following translation tries to capture in English the conversational flavor of an intentionally informal encounter characterizedby
a maximum of free exchange. To this end I have even retained passages in which Robbe-Grillet rather obviously cannibalizes his own
pronouncements. Certain gaps in the logic are due to telephone calls,
but in general the conversation picked up smoothly after these interruptions. There are no long silences on the tape; there is no stuttering.
Unfortunately, I cannot give the reader a sense of Robbe-Grillet's
resonant voice constantly changing register, frequently breaking into
guffaws or chuckles as he warms to a subject.
Q. Where would you locate your reader in terms of your fiction? Is
he witness to or a participant in the action? Is it possible that he is
aware of himself as a part of the creative process?
A. Perhaps that is the difference between the modern novel and the
novel of the last century, and between modern art in general and the
art of the last century. You know it was Marcel Duchamp who said
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X
xvI,

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that it is the viewers who make the painting. I think that is true of a
painting by Marcel Duchamp or of later painting, American pop art,
for example. The spectator before the canvas creates the painting. The
canvas is nothing without that presence. On the other hand, it's easy
to see the art of the last century as a closed universe which has no need
for the spectator, or the reader in the case of the novel.
One could say that the reader of one of my novels or the spectator
at one of my films is not really in front of but within. The work does
not exist except through his presence. That is, unless there is someone
within it who can reproduce the creative process. The relationship
between author, work, and public is no longer the relationshipbetween
someone who creates a finished work and another who receives it. We
now have a work which can exist only in a creative motion, which has
its primaryexistence when the author writes or makes a film and exists
a second time when the reader, the spectator, or in music the listener,
is again within the work as if he were himself creating it. That is something we often have trouble getting the public to admit. The public is
lazy and particularlythe novel-reading public which likes to find itself
before a work which does not imply its active presence and participation. But you can't enjoy a modern work if you don't enter into it.
Q. You speak of a shift in aesthetic attitude and we all make a good
deal of that change. Would you date the shift from Flaubert, from
Mallarme, from Lautreamont ... ?
A. Usually, when speaking of the novel we date it from Flaubert.
That is, we have the impression that between Flaubert and Balzac
something occurred, that Flaubert was the first novelist who asked
himself the capital question, "Why and for what do I write? What is
the power that I exploit? Who is speaking in my books?" etc. It is
almost as though Flaubert was the first to realize that writing is not
innocent, that it is an activity in which both writer and public are fully
engaged, not only by virtue of the anecdotal content but also by virtue
of the manner in which it is written.
Q.

Then it is a matter of verbal surface?

A. Rather a matter of what [Roland] Barthes has called "ecriture."

That is, we have the impressionthat for Balzac the problem of ecriture
did not exist. He used the third person past tense, writing a continuous
and chronological causal narrativein a natural manner, or as if it were
natural. He acted as though he believed it was natural. Flaubert, on
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the other hand, seems to have realized that nothing is natural, that
there is nothing natural in the act of writing (I'exercise de l'criture)
just as there is nothing natural in the use of any power. And the sociologists immediately compared this with what was happening to, for
example, political morality. The middle class incarnated by Balzac
really felt that the bourgeois order was the natural one, therefore right
and eternal. It appears that after, say, the revolution of '48, the idea
was suddenly born even in the bourgeoisie itself that the use of power
was not at all natural, that there was nothing natural about the workings of the established order. And, in fact, after 1850, there was a
parallel degeneration of bourgeois political order and narrative order.
It amounted to a declaration of liberty.
Q. Would it be possible to push those limits back a bit? When I read,
for example, your last two books (Maison de rendez-vous and Project
for a Revolution in New York), I think even of seventeenth-century
novels, novels by Furetiere, Sorel, Scaron and the rather complicated
games those authors play.
A. Yes, you know one could say that modern art has appeared very
revolutionaryin relation to what we could call bourgeois art. I am not
giving this term any precise political sense because these middle-class
values and this sense of order are as current in Moscow as they are in
New York and even in Havana. In fact, this middle-class order shaped
itself slowly and had a century of predominance, the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth . . . and also the end of the
nineteenth, if we think of writers like Zola. But if we take the art which
preceded that period, that is, even some authors you haven't mentioned, the great writers of the baroque period, for example, we do
find a view of ecriture and the nature of art which is much closer to the
the one we hold today. Even though the bourgeois values finally
triumphed, they were not really in effect during the earlier epoch.
Q. I'd like to return to something you said before. You mentioned
pop art. Is there any relationship between pop art and what you are
doing?
A. Yes, there probably are some connections, since on the one hand
I personally feel their presence, and on the other hand the great American pop artists also feel it. You know, I had a very strange experience.
Last year I spent six months in New York because I was teaching fulltime at New York University. During that period, one thing struck me,
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that is, "litterature"paid much less attention to me than "peinture."

Of course I was well-received in university circles, not only at my own
university but also at Columbia and at the other universities in the
area. But no important American writer sought me out. It was the
painters who seemed positively drawn toward me. And for my part I
had the same desire. I didn't want to meet writers like, I don't know,
say Norman Mailer or the great lights of the literary world in New
York.
They are doing something very different, aren't they?
A. Completely different. But you know I really wanted to meet the
pop art painters, and I did meet them thanks to art dealers, friends, art
critics, etc. I met, and I saw a good deal of Roy Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, and I am even working on a book with Rauschenberg. That is, we're collaborating on a book which will consist
partly of texts hand-written by me and reproduced photographically,
and partly of lithographs by Rauschenberg which will respond to my
texts. There will be a dialogue between pages of text and pages of
lithography. I have some of the proofs here which I can show you.
Now, what rapport? I don't know, but there is a common attitude
toward realism, certainly. What's odd is that in literature I feel closer
to the novelists of the last generation, to Faulkner, or even to Dos
Passos, you know, even to Hemingway. There are two American writers who fascinate me because I find them close to what I'm doing:
Burroughs and above all Nabokov.
Q.

Q.

Yes, but he isn't American.

A. He writes in American! He is as American as Beckett is French!

Look here, I'm rereadinghis Despair, which appeared in French in '33
but has just now been reprinted. A book like Pale Fire comes very
close to expressing my feelings. And Nabokov himself feels very close
to my books.
Q.

Is it a matter of style, of voice?

A. Of ecriture, a concept of literary creation completely different

from the pseudo-realismof Saul Bellow and Mailer.
Q. That reminds me of Roussel, who is after all very important at
this moment.
A.
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Ah, Raymond Roussel! I have one of his books here, the last one
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to come out, Epaves. I'm reading it right now. And you see, when a
contemporaryFrench writer like me spends time in New York, he feels
very close to the painters and close also to what is happening in
theater. The New York theater is very lively, more so than the French
theater. The painting milieu also, even though there have been signs
of life here lately, slight signs, and American inspired. French painting
today is strongly influenced by American painting. So, when I am in
New York, I see a lot of art shows, visit galleries and artists' studios.
I see a great many plays, not Broadway, of course, not even offBroadway, but off-off-off. But, as for literary circles, I find more life
in Paris.
Q. Which Parisian writers interest you now? After all, the nouveau
roman is already twenty years old.
A. Yes, the nouveau roman is twenty years old, but it can't date,
since, for me, the nouveau roman is perpetually changing. If you read
the latest book by Claude Simon, Triptyque, or Le Corps conducteur
which preceded it, you'll find them extremely different from what
appeared twenty years ago. In the same way, if you read Project for
a Revolution in New York, you find it very different from Jealousy. I
feel that all of the writers of the nouveau roman have evolved. And
there are some to whom I still feel very close and whose evolution
interestsme very much, particularlySimon and Pinget.
Q. But apart from that, there are certainly other movements. What
about the Tel Quel group?
A. The Tel Quel movement is very hard for me to discuss because,
first of all, I was once very close to it. I was its father, if you wish. They
say as much in the first collective volume they've published, Theorie
d'ensemble. Of course, in the paternal role, my relationship with them
has been "oedipal," especially with Sollers, who had trouble liquidating his.... But what they say about me I can't take very seriously. The
Tel Quel movement is extremely hard to define because it has always
been in flux. It hasn't shown the sort of revolutionary evolution we
find in the work of Simon. It keeps shifting its ground and often for
very personal reasons. The latest transformationsof Tel Quel vis a vis
the French Communist Party are completely mad. For three years
Sollers swore only by the Communist Party and you couldn't say a
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word against the Party without having Sollers accuse you of the worst
crimes. And then suddenly, in a fit of pique, he drags the Party in the
mud. He says that it was never worth anything anyway. Oh well, there
are far too many curious little events for us to be able to speak of a
Tel Quel movement. Quite apart from all that, there are many members of the group besides Sollers himself who are writers.
Q.

There was Jean Pierre Faye, but he's with Change now.

A. He was one of them, yes. There is Denis Roche, very much on the
fringe of the movement.
Q.

Yes, and Maurice Roche.

A. But Maurice Roche dates back to way before the Tel Quel movement.' He was writing much earlier. He was a friend of Henri Pichette
and he was also a musician. He's not at all a creation of Tel Quel. I
think there are no fundamental differences in our preoccupations and
aims, and besides, I find Sollers grouped more and more with the
nouveau roman by academic critics and even by Jean Ricardou.2
Q.

I think he wants to slip out of that category.

A. Yes. He tried it once, but I can't see the point. Really, we have
the same enemies. So what's accomplished by this sort of in-fighting?
I don't find it very interesting. I just noticed a list of books on the
nouveau roman in the PMLA bibliography. Sollers is always included
in the nouveau roman. After all, where else would you put him? The
Tel Quelists don't exist as a category since they are always changing
camp.
Q. You know, I think, and Ricardou seems to agree, that there is
another lineage. That is, they have other forebears. Perhaps we should
group them in terms of their roots.
A. Yes, if we ignore our little squabbles, all the nouveau romanciers
show an abiding interest in the problems of fiction, in what we could
call novelistic forms and their evolution. On the other hand, when
Sollers places himself among the descendants of Antonin Artaud, we
have a very different thing, and, in fact, an important difference.
1 Actually, Roche began publishing fiction under the auspices of Tel Quel
in 1966.
2 See Ricardou, Problemes du noveau roman and Pour une theorie du
noveau roman.

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Q. In your latest novels, and also in the fragments you published

in Minuit 1, there is an interesting erotic aspect, an eroticism which
is almost anti-erotic since it seems to deny eroticism. I wonder if that
effect was intended and what you expect the erotic to accomplish in
your work?
A. I can't talk about the theory. It's the practice that interests me.
By practice, I mean the literary practice, the textual practice. The
other sort of practice (of the erotic) interests me too, but that's something else again. In my current films and novels the erotic is a privileged subject matter [materiaux privileges]. As a matter of fact it has
appeared more frequently and it has become increasingly distanced
from what we've traditionally called erotic. That is, for all practical
purposes amorous relationships, sexual relationships, are absent. What
we find is not bodies but images of bodies. They are quite often not
even images but images of images since the bodies...
Q.

In "The Secret Room"....

A. And also in Project for a Revolution, the images are mannequins,

often. I'll show you some stills from my last film where I shot that
sequence of the tortured mannequin [from Project].3
Q.

You seem to be turning a bit toward surrealism, don't you think?

A. Perhaps. There are some resemblances with surrealism. What

I'm doing is very sophisticated, very calculated, very staged, very much
the spectacle, perhaps also, rather icy [glace].
Q. That's funny. Just recently, I read a review of an English history
of the modern novel. The author of that book speaks of you as an
"icy playboy."
A. Icy! [Laughter]You know, people are often surprised to find me
much less icy than my work. It's really hard for me to say anything
abstract about my [erotic] images. It's true that I am interested in
manipulating them, and it's true that one sees them appearing more
and more frequently in my writing and in my films. The fragments you
3 After the interview, Robbe-Grillet showed me the promised stills from his
current film featuring a mannequin with bloody nipples like the manequin-girl
in Project. The camera is used to create a similar ambiguity when it pans in on
a live nude posed as though inanimate over whose mons veneris someone breaks
eggs. Robbe-Grillet remarked to his wife that the actress managed to simulate
waxy stillness during the pose.
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read in Minuit I originally accompanied photos by David Hamilton.

They belong to a much larger narrativewhich will come out next year.
As pieces they belong for the moment to art dealers since they accompany either the lithographsof Rauschenberg or the engravings of Paul
Delvaux. They are only fragments of a larger novel of which certain
elements were written for Rauschenberg, certain for Delvaux, and
others for the photographerHamilton.
Q. It seems to me that we have there the three thematic axes of your
work. There is the element of pop art, the element...
A.

Surrealistic,yes....

Q.

And the erotic element. The erotic begins with The Voyeur.

A. It's already there, yes. And it's the heroine of The Voyeur who
appears, only with a much bigger role to play, in the Project. She's a
little girl, still pre-adolescent. She belongs to a race we call Lolitas.
Q. Yes, and she reminds me also of Zola's heroine Catherine in
Germinale.
A. Of course, but there are a number of literary heroines who resemble the little girl in my books. There is certainly the Lolita of Nabokov
and also Lewis Caroll's Alice. There are, by the way, allusions to Alice
in the text. Then we have Sade's Justine, a very strange little girl, and
why not also Raymond Queneau's Zazie?
Q.

Perhaps we don't pay enough attention to that aspect of Queneau.

A. I never forget to say when I make public pronouncements that

the official list of nouveaux romans is fairly meaningless for me. Certainly, if I were to make up a list, I'd put Raymond Queneau on it,
particularlybooks like Le Chiendent, which appeared in '33.
Q.

Yes, and Celine? He's something else.

A. Celine too. It's strange how Celine's opening sentences resemble

Beckett's. Have you noticed that? Listen, "Here we are again
alone.. .." Really, you'd think you were reading the first sentence of
a Beckett novel.
Q.
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Yes, and it's also the opening line of the traditional clown when
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he steps out on stage, "here we are again."

A. Ah yes. Let's compare the first line of Malone to the end of
Celine's paragraph,4"I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all."
What's strange is that we have a first line which emphasizes the
word "finished."5
Q.

I find the relationship even more remarkable in one of Celine's

later books, Feerie pour une autre fois, three-fourths of which con-

sists of an undergroundmonologue that resembles nothing so much as

Beckett's Unnamable. But I have another question. What is the rapport between the films you are making and have made for ten years
and what you are doing now in the novel? I find that your novels are
much more scene-oriented now.
A.

Because of the films?

Q.

I don't know, because of them or perhaps for other reasons.

A. No, I don't think so. I think that there has been an evolution in
the novel and that that evolution is quite naturally reflected in the
cinema. For me these are two very different mediums [materiaux].
What is remarkable is that thematic aspect. You know I really enjoy
not so much adapting my novels to the film as employing identical
thematic materials in both, like, for example, the tortured mannequin
we were speaking of earlier, or a broken glass, or blood. These are
really ...
Q.

Motifs which are repeated....

A.

Yes.

Q.

But there is another question. Your cinema is a sort of anti-

cinema.

A. Ah yes, there is an attempt to destructure [destructurer],to subvert the narrative, an attempt at deconstructing as they say now.
Q.

The effect is almost literaryat times.

A.

What do you call literary?

4 "Soon I'll be old and it will

finally be over." Celine, Death on the Installment Plan.
5 The emphasis intended here is probably on the
concept "end" rather than
the word, the idea of beginning with death and completion.

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Q.

I'd say that the effects are effects of texture.

A. Yes, but I don't call that literary! Those are cinematic textures.
You know they claim that our experimental cinema [cinema de
recherche] is a literary cinema. It's as though there were a norm, a
naturalnessabout certain types of narrative, but I don't believe that is
so. For me the most literarycinema is the cinema of Truffaut, Chabrol,
the novelistic cinema which in fact reproduces literary forms of the
last century. That, for me, is literary cinema. On the other hand, the
cinema which manipulates the cinematic textual materials is really
cinema.

Q. And in your novels, where the descriptive passages use effects of

tromp l'oeil, there are visual qualities which suggest an attempt to undo
the narrative.
A. Yes, in fact there is an effort to undo the code of the narrative,
that is, the normal practice, the established order. There is an established order for the novel, which I feel must constantly be put in question, destroyed, subverted. At the same time we must subvert the
illusion of realism.
Q. In Project for a Revolution I sense that you are toying with a particular novelistic convention, namely the convention of situating the
action in an America of the mind (the dream). For example, the
apartment you describe, far from being an American apartment, is
completely Parisian. Even the door....
A. A door with a key hole! There is no such door in New York ...
and a minute-miser in the hallway. There are no minute-misers in
New York. And when you hear the firetrucks,you hear the noise made
by Parisian firetrucks.
Q. And then I have a feeling that all the imagery of the novel is
inspired by the paint patterns on the door, that ugly imitation-woodtextured paint one finds on all the doors of Paris.
A. Yes, of course, and that one finds in every one of my books.
There is also one in The Voyeur. And the subway itself. In the New
York subway the benches run parallel to the sides of the train, whereas
here they are arrangedin rows, like in the Paris Metro.
Q.
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That too makes me think of Celine and of Kafka.

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A.

Of course, Kafka's Amerika.

Q. But while Kafka never visited America, Celine and you have both
spent time there.
A. Yes, and it was all the more important that I knew things are not
like that. You know, oddly enough, I've received letters from American readers, men, and particularly women, living in New York, who
tell me, "Really, it's extraordinary how you manage to describe the
anguish of this city. I live with that anguish and now each time I pass
the window over the fire escape, I check to see if it's really fastened
shut, etc." You see, they have lived the book totally in terms of the
realist illusion without being disturbed by the accumulation of details
that are completely, historically, false.
Q.

But you are, in fact, thinking of New York.

A.

Yes, I'm here, in Paris, thinking of New York.

Q.

And perhapsyou are thinking of the tales.

A. Of the mythology of the subway where people are raped, yes,

of course. Yes, I think that my city is Paris, but all of the big occidental
cities are moving in the intellectual direction of New York. It is a sort
of supercity where all the qualities of our cities are exaggerated,
pushed toward the limit. Richness is richer, but dirt is dirtier. New
York is richer than any rich city in the world, but it's dirtier than any
dirty city in the world. Poorer also; poverty is greater, richness is
greater, splendor is greater, fear is greater, anguish is greater, freedom
is greater too. It's one of the cities where freedom is really greater,
don't you agree? It's a city which really excites me.
Q.

I think it is a city which fascinates.

A. Yes, but why? Simply because it's the horrible projection of our
city of the future.
Q. In your latest books I notice an increasing tendency to include
personages from the earlier books. The effect is rather Balzacian, but
it is oblique Balzac.
A.

Oblique Balzac, yes.

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Q. Nevertheless, I find that these characters,who are about as unreal

as they can be, become real. Perhaps the literary conventions are so
strong that the reader permits himself to complete the vision.
A. That's true enough to a degree. There is a more or less fraudulent
reading which categorizes as credible characters who are not believable. But there is also the fact that my novels and my films are quite
tricky [retors]. That is, my relations with "realism" are not simple.
I think there is a constant tension in my books between a sort of ideal
abstraction to which I give voice and, despite everything, the sort of
empirical reality we find in novels of the last century. I feel that things
are not as simple as Ricardou would have them when he speaks of a
fiction which has become almost mathematical. I think rather that my
books maintain subtle and more or less fraudulent relations with what
one could call the "traditionalnovel," relations which at times appear
like pieces in a collage more or less distorted, but only more or less,
sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more.
Take Project for a Revolution in New York, which is as realistic
a novel as is possible, given the fact that the book does not concern
itself with New York, and that the action is incredible, etc. There are
fragments which seem unexpectedly to belong to the still-possible literature of a still-possible novelistic mode. The character of the little
girl has at times a presence similar to the one she might have in a traditional novel. And it is that which interests me. If you wish, it is these
unresolved tensions between two poles, a tension between the subjective and the objective, the realistic illusion and total abstraction, and
between the erotic which functions as such and another which would
be impossible within the domain of the erotic. Such unresolved contradictions maintain in the book or in the film lines of force, and I
think if there is a possible reading, it's thanks to this quality.
Q. I find that this quality becomes very personal. Perhaps that's what
is most important about your work. The whole apparatus of impersonality, while not completely false, is a faCade.
A. Yes, there is also a tension between the personal and the impersonal, because, in the last analysis, my books, which appear to be so
impersonalare also very personal.
Q. That's clear enough today, but in the beginning it wasn't at all
clear.
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A. There are plenty of things which were not evident in the beginning. For example, they have finally realized that there is a good deal
of humor in my books. But in the beginning nobody noticed it, with
the possible exception of Beckett. One sees more humor now, but it
was there from the start. There were things in Jealousy which made
me laugh heartily but which amused no one else.
Q.

What sort of things were they?

A. Ah, that's very difficult since it concerns the text itself. At times,
for example, textual impossibilities which can go almost unnoticed
but which are for me particularlyfunny.
Q. I find quite a few instances in Project. That book seems funnier
than the others and so do the fragments you did for David Hamilton.
As I read the passages I kept the photos in mind. They are pastoral
in mood, pictures of soft young girls in misty settings. But the texts
poke perverse fun at all that. They are jokes.
A.

Yes, and Hamilton, who has a sense of humor too, liked that.

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