Fictional Narratives of Embodiment in Robbe-Grillet's Works

ABSTRACT.I am specifically interested in how previous research investigated Robbe-Grillet's depiction of sexuality, his professed aims of creating works of bricolage, the avant-garde style of Robbe-Grillet's novels, and the phenomeno logical reduction in Robbe-Grillet's works. The paper generates insights about the considerable richness and complexity of Robbe-Grillet's work, the nature of Robbe-Grillet's writing and his own participation in the discourse of literary theory, and the requirement of any Robbe-Grillet narrative for the participation of the reader.Keywords: Robbe-Grillet's film and fiction, phenomenological reduction, human embodiment1. IntroductionThe theory that I shall seek to elaborate here puts considerable emphasis on Robbe-Grillet's formal strategies of subversion, the rendering of human embodiment in Robbe-Grillet's film and fiction, the phenomenological analysis of Robbe-Grillet's film and fiction, and fictional narratives of embodiment in Robbe-Grillet's works. The literature on Robbe-Grillet's stated aims of undermining sexual stereotypes, the complexity of Robbe-Grillet's texts, and the habitual physical and cultural environments of Robbe-Grillet's protagonists is relevant to this discussion.2. The Presentation of Narrative Perspective in Robbe-Grillet's Film and FictionGieskes notes that Robbe-Grillet bases his films of the 1960s on the variable rules of games, in order to expose and replace conventional orders, talks about the orders underlying his novels and films in terms of information theory, drawing analogies between musical structure and the repetition and variation of his own novels and films,1 and compares the traditional narrative system in literature to the tonal system: the Nouveau Roman successfully defies the literary equivalent of the tonal system.It follows from this that when composers introduce new, unexpected musical events or dissonances into the tonal system, the new dissonances are integrated into the traditional framework. Robbe-Grillet discusses the unusual structures of his films and novels in terms of information theory, describes the unexpected elements as disorderly or formless (they disrupt the orderly system of probability that previously dominated people's experience), bases many of his novels and films on game-like structures, including characters that are engaged in game-playing, and compares himself to bridge-players, for whom the card is a flat surface, the value of which is determined solely by the arbitrary and temporary rules of the game.Gieskes contends that, in Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Robbe-Grillet allows the protagonist to reconstruct the events that might have happened a year earlier in a variety of contradictory versions. Novelists should not write books that can be poured into a pre-existing mold. The traditional narrative order reflects the bourgeois social order, pretending that it is the only natural order that exists. In The Erasers (1953), Garinati is obsessed with order as exhibited in his obsessive arrangement of objects on the mantelpiece. Complex orders are not meaningful (these orders are not immediately recognized and are perceived by the public as disorder). New orders that are at first perceived as disorderly will with some familiarization be recognized as orderly. Robbe-Grillet' s characters are sometimes obsessed with order (he provides many descriptions of regularly-arranged objects or systematicallyoperating machines).2Smith states that Robbe-Grillet' s works radically undermine conventional expectations:3 plots appear to have been fragmented out of existence. RobbeGrillet considers it necessary to find new directions more appropriate to our reality (the process of searching for an efficacious answer takes on more interest than an outcome that has lost its meaning), lets the story itself tell us it is a piece of fiction, by surreptitiously suspending the diegesis and having the characters search for narrative solutions, uses the speaking reader as a means of foregrounding the play with the implied reader, and transforms images of narrative indeterminacy into metaphors of rebirth. …