The New Novel

Here then is the charter of the New Novel as general supposition circulates it:

1. The New Novel has codified the laws of the future novel.
2. The New Novel has made a tabula rasa of the past.
3. The New Novel seeks to eliminate man from the world
4. The New Novel aims at a perfect objectivity.
5. The New Novel, difficult to read, is addressed only to specialists.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

died yesterday...

Marks Of Identity - pg. 254

"I would like to see Lives Without Aim published in the same collection as The Old Man and the Sea."
"Do you like William Faulkner/'
"He's a fraud. My favorite writers are Maugham and Vicki Baum."
"Are you familiar with Sartre's work?"
"My wife thumbed through one of his books and she says he writes about filth."
"And Kafka?"
"I've never read him."
"What do you think of Robbe-Grillet."
"Who did you say?"
"Are you follower of the nouveau roman?"
"Neither my wife nor I can handle French. Spanish is more than enough for us."
"How long did it take you to write your last novel?"
"Eight days."
"Do you rewrite."
"Never, What's gained in niceties is lost in a lack of spontaneity."
"What narrative technique do you prefer?"
"Technique is another fraud. Cervantes didn't know anything about theories when he wrote Don Quixote."
"Are you working on something new?"
"Yes. I have in mind a novel about the battle of the generations, between fathers and sons, and I'm going to set it in Harlem."
"Oh, you've been to the United States?"
"No, this is the first time I've ever been out of Spain."
"Do you like Paris?"

The Voyeur - Closing

Since the buoy was not light enough to follow the movement of the waves, the water level rose and fell according to their rhythms against the sides of the cone. Despite the water's transparency, the detail of the substructures could not be distinguished -- merely a number of dancing shapes: chains, rocks, trailing seaweed, or perhaps reflections of the mass above water.
The salesman thought, once again, that in three hours he would be on land.

The Voyeur - pg. 110

At the angle of narrow passageway between two almost vertical walls, the water alternately swelled and hollowed with each wave; at this point there was neither foam nor backwash; the moving mass of water remained smooth and blue, rising and falling against the rock walls. The disposition of the nearby rocks forced a sudden influx of liquid into the narrows so that the level rose to a height greatly exceeding that of the initial wave. The collapse followed at once, creating in a few seconds, in the same place, a depression so deep that it was surprising not to be able to see sand, or pebbles, or the undulating fronds of seaweed at the bottom. On the contrary, the surface remained the same intense blue tinged with violet along the rock wall. But away from the coast, the sea appeared beneath a sky filled with clouds, a flat, even green, opaque, as if it had been frozen.

The Voyeur - pg. 97

As for the other reason, it must be confessed that Maria's investigations represented only the time it would take to sell a watch - near a crossroads - to repair a new bicycle, to tell the difference between a frog's skin and a toad's, to rediscover in the all-too-changeable shapes of clouds the fixed eye of a sea gull, to follow the movements of an ant's antennae in the dust.

The Voyeur - pg. 82

The countryside was noticeably different here: there was an embankment on either side of the road lined with a thick, virtually unbroken hedge behind which rose the occasional turn of a pine leaning toward the southwest, the direction of the prevailing winds (that is, the trees on the left side of the drive leaning over the hedge, those on the right leaning away from it).

The Voyeur - pg. 38

This time the garageman started off on still more complicated considerations in which he managed to imply that Mathias must have been born on the island to conceive the preposterous notion of returning to it for a sales trip, and at the same time that the expectation of selling a single wrist watch betrayed a complete ignorance of the place, and finally that names like his didn't mean a thing -- you could find them wherever you liked.

The Voyeur - pg. 22

Today especially, success would be a matter of imagination.

The Voyeur - pg. 15

To give those five fingers something to do, he gripped them around the handle of the little suitcase he had been holding in his other hand. It was an ordinary enough suitcase, but its solid manufacture inspired confidence: it was made of a very hard, reddish-brown fiber, the corners reinforced with some material of a darker, almost chocolate color. The handle, fastened with two metal clasps, was made of a softer, imitation-leather material. The lock, the two hinges, and the three big rivets at each of the eight corners looked like copper, as did the clasps of the handle, but even slight wear had already revealed the real composition of the four rivets on the bottom: copper-plated babbit metal, which was obviously what the other twenty rivets were made of - and doubtless the rest of the fittings as well.

The Voyeur - pg. 7

The pier, which seemed longer than it actually was as an effect of perspective, extended from both sides of this base line in a cluster of parallels describing, with a precision accentuated even more sharply by the morning light, a series of elongated planes alternately horizontal and vertical: the crest of the massive parapet that protected the tidal basin from the open sea, the inner wall of the parapet, the jetty along the top of the pier, and the vertical embankment that plunged straight into the water of the harbor. Te two vertical surfaces were in shadow, the other two brilliantly lit by the sun - the whole breadth of the parapet and all of the jetty save for one dark narrow strip: the shadow cast by the parapet. Theoretically, the reversed image of the entire group could be seen reflected in the harbor water, and, on the surface, still within the same play of parallels, the shadow cast by the vertical embankment extending straight toward the quay.

The Voyeur - pg. 5

There was the sound of an electric bell. The engines started up again. The ship began to make a turn that brought it gradually closer to the pier. The coast rapidly extended along the other side: the squat lighthouse striped black and white, the half-ruined fort, the sluice gates of the tidal basin, the row of houses on the quay.

The Voyeur - Opening

It was as if no one had heard.
The whistle blew again - a shrill, prolonged noise followed by three short blasts of ear-splitting violence: a violence without purpose that remained without effect. There was no more reaction - no further exclamation - then there had been at first; not one feature of one face had even trembled.


Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Voyeur
Translated by Richard Howard
GROVE PRESS INC. NEW YORK