Alain Robbe-Grillet and the Secret Room

Alain Robbe-Grillet and The Secret Room

On page 2032 of the class’s anthology, there is a work by Alain Robbe-Grillet entitled “The Secret Room”. What interests me about this work is that I thought that this topic or story is deep and hard to get the idea. So, I wanted to know about Alain Robbe-Grillet and wanted to get the idea. In this connection, the question that I want to research is who Alain Robbe-Grillet is and what is this story about.

First of all, Robbe-grillet, he was born in Brittany, France, where was the place for scientists and engineers. At first, he was not a writer. He earned the degree in mathematics and natural science. He started working at National Institute of Statistics and published an article on livestock possibilities before deciding to work part time in his sister’s biology laboratory and write a novel. The first novel he wrote was “A Regicide” in 1949. But, it didn’t published until 1978 which was the time after he became a successful novelist.

Robbe-Grillet was one of the foremost filmmakers and the novelists of the French new novel, of the twentieth century. Frustrated about the lack of progress and innovation in the art of the novel since the nineteenth century, Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Saurrate began to write complex novels that interrogated and challenged conventional narrative modes, novels that altered or abolished fictional elements such as character, plot, setting, point of view, and chronological time in favor of repetitions, an absence of emotion, minute objective and sometimes geometric descriptions, the lack of authorial analysis, and the deconstruction of time. His films also reflect his desire to challenge the conventions of filmmaking, but he is recognized principally as a novelist.

The novels of Robbe-Grillet all challenge their readers to reevaluate the way they read, the way they think, and the way they visualize the world around them. The novels are vastly different from each other. “The Erasers“ concerns a police inspector, Wallas, and his search for a man who has supposedly killed another man who, in actuality, was not killed. The novel is set in a small Belgian city, a city with a considerable network of canals and bridges and boulevards that all look the same; throughout the novel, the city becomes a type of labyrinth, adding an ambiguous complexity of space to the novel's non linear chronology.

“The Erasers” is more accessible than his later novels like “Jealousy“ and “In The Labyrinth”, both penultimate examples of the New Novel. The erratic chronology, suggested symbols, circular repetitions, and stylized description deconstruct time and space in these novels forcing the reader to reconstruct the plot. These writerly texts transport readers to complex fictional, hence illusory, universes. The visual nature of Robbe-Grillet's books continue in his later novels, of which the collaborative novel “La Belle Captive”, a novel written by Robbe-Grillet with paintings and illustrations by the surrealist Renй Margritte, is a perfect example where art informs art and the two mediums color the "reading" of each other. Recently, in 1995, Robbe-Grillet finished a trilogy: a fictional autobiography. Embracing the vogue genre of the autobiography and foregrounding its inherently subjective nature, Robbe-Grillet continues to brave the edge of his art in the same spirit of innovation that has marked all his work.

Robbe-Grillet, he is very good at