Nouveau Roman

This term appears to have become part of the critical jargon in France c. 1955 with the publication (in periodicals and reviews) of Robbe-Grillet’s essays on the nature and future of the novel. His theories were later gathered in Pour un nouveau roman (1963). The movement, if so it can be called, of the nouveau roman was somewhat biblioclastic in the sense that it rejected much that had gone before. In his evangelical role Robbe-Grillet regarded many earlier novelists as vieux jeu. Plot, action, narrative, ideas, the delineation and analysis of character … such things had little or no place in the novel. On the contrary, the novel should be a form of "re-istentialism"—to use Paul Jenning’s word. It should be about things; an individual version and vision of things; a systematized and analytical record of objects. And so, in practice, many of the nouveaux romans were and are; and hardly anywhere is the practice better displayed than in Michel Butor’s outstanding novel La Modification (1957).

Such a view of the function of the novel was not entirely new. Long before, Huysmans had suggested what might be done about objects and how the novel might be depersonalized; Kafka had shown that the conventional methods of depicting character were not essential; James Joyce had demonstrated that plot was dispensable; and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, in several novels, but especially in Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), had written of themes which later preoccupied the existentialists and the hodjas (mentors) of the cult of the absurd, and especially those of the Theatre of the Absurd. Proust, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, and Albert Camus had also shown that it was possible to break with a number of the traditional conventions of the novel form.

In 1939 Nathalie Sarraute pulblished Tropismes and this has come to be regarded as a probable prototype of the nouveau roman. Later, in 1952, she published a collection of essays called L’Ere du soupe on in which she discussed this new form. In the 1940s Maurice Blanchot wrote several nouveaux romans: Aminadab (1942), Le Dernier Mot (1947), Les Tre s-Haut (1948). These he followed with Le Ressassement éternel (1951), Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (1953) and several others. Robbe-Grillet, who has come to be the best known of these novelists, wrote Les Gommes [The Erasers] (1953), Le Voyeur (1955), La Jalousie (1957), and Dan le labyrinthe (1959). Michel Butor has also experimented in L’Emploi du temps (1957) and Degrés (1960). One should also mention other works by Nathalie Sarraute; in particular Portrait d’un inconnu (1947), Le Planétarium (1959), and Vous les entendez (1972). Another prominent member among the experimenters is Claude Simon, some of whose best novels are: Le Tricheur (1945), L’Herbe (1958), La Route de Flandres (1960), Historie (1967), and La Bataille de Pharsale (1969).

--J.A. Cuddon