Alain Robbe-Grillet:The French writer and film-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet died of heart failure in hospital in Normandy on February 18th at the age of 85. Outside France, Robbe-Grillet was probably the best-known French writer of the late 20th century, but he was ill-loved in his own country.
Robbe-Grillet's rise to fame began in the 1950s, when every trend in France was labelled "new". Just as Christian Dior brought le new look to fashion and François Truffaut la nouvelle vague to cinema, Robbe-Grillet was the chief theoretician of the nouveau roman.
Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985), Michel Butor and Marguerite Duras were Robbe-Grillet's cohorts in his crusade to kill what he called the Balzacian novel. Modern prose, these writers believed, should be comparable to abstract painting: without definable plot, characters or narrative.
"Henceforward, we write joyfully on [ a foundation of] ruins," Robbe-Grillet wrote gleefully in Pour un Nouveau Roman (1963). French critics like Roland Barthes took the art form seriously, but the public found it daunting.
"American universities saved the nouveau roman," Robbe-Grillet often said with a devilish laugh. He spent much of the 1970s lecturing on US campuses, where he turned the nouveau roman into a cottage industry.
A collection of his work published in 2002 was entitled Le Voyageur. Though he settled in the 17th-century chateau in Normandy that he purchased with his royalties, Robbe-Grillet thought of himself as a constant traveller since his year in a forced labour camp in Germany during the second World War.
"Since the 1940s, I rarely ceased pacing the planet," he wrote, describing himself as a "missionary for the nouveau roman, a crusader for the literature of the future, and willing professor of myself."
Critics believed Robbe-Grillet's first novel, Les Gommes, published in 1953, was a metaphysical detective story, but they weren't certain. In Le Voyeur, published two years later, a travelling salesman criss-crosses an island on a bicycle; the reader is not sure if a crime has been committed. La Jalousie (1957) drew on Robbe-Grillet's experience as an agronomist in the West Indies. In it, a centipede, watched by a jealous husband, slowly climbs the wall of a house.
In 1955, Robbe-Grillet became a literary adviser to Jérôme Lindon, the founder of Éditions de Minuit. Samuel Beckett, who was also published by Minuit, was a friend. As an editor at Minuit until 1985 and as a member of several juries for literary prizes, Robbe-Grillet held great power over 20th-century French literature.
Robbe-Grillet began a parallel career when he wrote the film classic L'année Dernière à Marienbad, which was directed by Alain Resnais in 1961. In it, the actors Delphine Seyrig and Dirk Bogarde wander through the labyrinthine rooms and gardens of a central European chateau, eternally wondering whether they've met before.
Perhaps in the hope of attracting the public's attention, Robbe-Grillet's books and films were increasingly based on his own sado-erotic fantasies, often involving pubescent girls and bondage. In his 1966 film Trans-Europ-Express, Jean-Louis Trintignant raped Marie-France Pisier three times. Robbe-Grillet's tendency to mistake his sexual obsessions for art reached its paroxysm in his last book, ironically entitled Un Roman Sentimental and published last autumn.
Under the pen name Jean de Berg, Robbe-Grillet's wife Catherine, who survives him, also wrote semi-pornographic novels.
Robbe-Grillet regaled in his own notoriety, and in the scandals created by his work. "I am famous for being famous," he often said, quoting Andy Warhol. Students, readers and the public sometimes suspected he was having a laugh at their expense.
Libération this week described Robbe-Grillet's "Mephistophelean [ after the evil spirit to whom Faust sold his soul] laugh, pitiless and without tenderness, but nonetheless a form of gaiety, of stainless steel youth, sardonic and flamboyant." Robbe-Grillet often mocked the august Académie Française, telling interviewers he'd rather die than join it.
Yet imitating the unexplained twists of his novels, he sought election to it in 2004 and was accepted. "He was not a good writer, but he was a fine grammarian," explained Michel Déon, an academician who lives in Ireland.
However, in the more than three years since his election, he never set foot in the academy. Now the group is in crisis, with seven of 40 seats vacant. France's great men of letters are unable to agree on new candidates - a stalemate to which Robbe-Grillet contributed. Once again, the last laugh was on him.
Alain Robbe-Grillet: born August 18th, 1922; died February 18th, 2008