Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet (born Aug. 18, 1922, Brest, France — died Feb. 18, 2008, Caen, France), was a representative writer and leading theoretician of the nouveau roman ("new novel"), French "anti-novel" that emerged in the 1950s, as well as a screenwriter and film director. He is best known in the anglosphere for his screenplay to Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and won the Golden Lion award, the highest prize of the Venice Film Festival, when it came out in 1961. He also won the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize of 1962 for his 1962 film L'Immortelle ("The Immortal One").

The year before his death, Robbe-Grillet published his last novel, Un roman sentimental ("A Sentimental Novel", 2007), based on his own sexual fantasies about barely pubescent females. The book was translated into English by D.E. Brooke and published in 2014 by‎ Dalkey Archive Press, being available for purchase online.

The translator's preface makes clear that the book contains detailed fictions of progressive sadism and torture, a growing harem of young females, and a pedagogical master/slave intergenerational relationship between the main 14-year-old female character Gigi, and her father. The translator also points out that the project of translating the original French novel was rejected by numerous American publishers “due to its subject matter, which was considered beyond the pale.” “This pious exhibition of moral opprobrium,” he wrote of American publishers, “can be classified as wrongheaded, springing from a comfort zone of profound and habitual moral hypocrisy.” He maintains that,

“In case the reader might imagine that the book is a one note tale of grim horror, it is important to mention that, odd though it may appear, lighter touches do abound. There is tenderness between the girls, as well as in the development of the father-daughter relationship, even as Gigi submits to, or with her father's collusion delivers, gruesome punishments.”

A Sentimental Novel book cover in English

The English text has been thoughtfully reviewed multiple times. One reviewer explains and quotes from the novel:

"Consisting of 239 numbered paragraphs, “the novel purports to transform into a work of literary fiction,” as the translator states in his thoughtfully argued introduction, “the author’s own avowed catalog of perverse fantasies, which he claimed had remained unchanged since the age of twelve, and that he had been making notes of over the years" [...] "The sadism slowly but surely begins on page four. As Gigi reads aloud, her “master” father is “as attentive to the prosody as he is to posture, [appraising] his lovely schoolgirl without the slightest indulgence, prepared to punish with a single, dry snap of his baton the smallest mistake in reading, rhythm, or even diction.”

"Several other girls become involved in the tale, which is of the story-within-a-story-within-a-story genre. They will be enslaved and tortured each in turn. No details are spared, even in this relatively moderate passage:

Domenica, Domi for short, then drags her prisoner along on a leash, forcing her to advance on her knees, which she is not allowed to bring any closer to one another. If she fails to move quickly enough, or looks like she might be bringing her thighs any closer together, one of the little girls assisting with punishments (young than their leader, even) jabs her bottom with a porker’s needle, ever delighted to add to the sufferings of a disgraced rival being led to her death."

The novel is often compared to the French Marquis de Sade’s famous sexual sadism novel 120 Days of Sodom, with one commentator writing: "the dispassionate way it's told is neither shocking nor horrible. Yet, again, the actions are perfectly monstrous. If you are a fan of Sade, or serious erotic writing that conveys more than sex, this book may be of interest to you." One reviewer compares the novel to Georges Battaille's Story of the Eye (1926), while another interprets the text as an unremarkable commentary on the normalization of violence upon females, historical patriarchy, and how females now learn to participate willingly in violence through the normalization of contemporary BDSM culture.

In interviews, Robbe-Grillet stated that he “loved little girls” but had never acted on his fantasies (Shatz, 2014):

"Yes, he had ‘loved little girls’ since he was 12, but he had never acted on his fantasies. In fact he had ‘mastered’ them. And he continued in this half-facetious, half-moralising vein: ‘someone who writes about his perversion is someone who has control over it.’ […]

The virile looks, however, were deceptive, as his wife Catherine discovered. She was the daughter of Armenians from Iran; they met in 1951 in the Gare de Lyon, as they were both boarding a train to Istanbul. He was instantly taken by her. Barely out of her teens, not quite five feet tall and only forty kilos, Catherine Rstakian ‘looked so young then that everyone thought she was still a child’. She inspired in him (as he later wrote) ‘desperate feelings of paternal love – incestuous, needless to say’. […] ‘His fantasies turned obsessively around sadistic domination of (very) young women, by default little girls,’ she wrote in her memoir of their life together, Alain. He gave her ‘drawings of little girls, bloodied’. (‘Reassure yourself, he never transgressed the limits of the law,’ she adds.) […]

From then on, she says, he ‘isolated himself in an ivory tower populated with prepubescent fantasies, in the pursuit, in his “retirement”, of the waking dreams in his Roman sentimental – reveries of a solitary sadist.’ […]

In Les Derniers jours de Corinthe, the second of these romanesques, he wrote that while working in Martinique he had become infatuated with a ‘pink and blonde’ girl who had ‘the air of a bonbon’; Marianne, the 12-year-old daughter of a local magistrate, would sit on his knee, ‘conscious without doubt’ of the effect these ‘lascivious demonstrations’ had on him."

His crime/detecive novel "The Voyeur", first published in French in 1955 and translated into English in 1958, was awarded the Prix des Critiques. According to wikipedia:

"The Voyeur relates the story of Mathias, a traveling watch salesman who returns to the island of his youth with a desperate objective. As with many of his novels, The Voyeur revolves around an apparent murder: throughout the novel, Mathias unfolds a newspaper clipping about the details of a young girl's murder and the discovery of her body among the seaside rocks. Mathias' relationship with a dead girl, possibly that hinted at in the story, is obliquely revealed in the course of the novel so that we are never actually sure if Mathias is a killer or simply a person who fantasizes about killing. Importantly, the "actual murder," if such a thing exists, is absent from the text. The narration contains little dialogue, and an ambiguous timeline of events."

Robbe-Grillet recieved many prestigious appointments and awards during his working life. In addition to the awards he won, he led the Centre for the Sociology of Literature (Centre de sociologie de la littérature) at the Belgian Université Libre de Bruxelles from 1980 to 1988, and from 1971 to 1995, he was a professor at New York University where he lectured on his own novels. Robbe-Grillet was elected to the Académie française (the French Academy) in 2004.