Now showing: The Venetian Blind [Jealousy]
The Venetian Blind [Jealousy]
Robbe-Grillet is recognised as the one of the foremost proponents of the nouveau roman - a genre which comes to prominence in the 50s and 60s, particularly in France. As such the genre takes its cue from cultural movements at work such as existentialism and the nascent ideas of structuralism, and ultimately, deconstruction.
The nouveau roman eschews such providential (authorial / narratorial) interventions as plot, narrative arc, chronological realism, intention, and even meaning and purpose. Instead, the surface of things becomes paramount: just as in Sartre's existential world, there is nothing behind objects, so in the world that Robbe-Grillet creates, there is no redemptive purpose, intention, meaning, underlying truth, or even allegorical or analytical logic.
As such, a novel like Jealousy divides readers: some will stare as the sentences pass them by, wondering blankly why they shouldn't go and do something else. Others however, find in the novel's studious avoidance of narratorial intervention and continual striving towards utterly objective descriptions of the surface of things, the geometry, the dimensions, the slowly decaying unity of space and time, and the obsessively repeated presentation of re-presented events and objects, the same intellectual joy that Roland Barthes is celebrating in his advocation of the writerly text - for what 'lies beneath' the surface of things is no more and no less than what we put there.