Alain Robbe-Grillet (born August 18, 1922) is a French writer and filmmaker, born in Brest, Finistère, France into a family of engineers and scientists. He was trained as an agricultural engineer. In 1944 the National Institute of Agronomy awarded him a diploma. Later, he worked as an agronomist in Martinique. Either at university or while in Martinique, he studied the diseases of banana trees. Husband of Catherine Robbe-Grillet (née Rstakian). He is, with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the trend of the nouveau roman. Along with Maurice Blanchot and other French writers he is sometimes referred to as "French Structuralists" due to the critiques of their works by the famous structuralist Roland Barthes. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat #32.
His first novel, A Regicide, was written in the early 1950's, but was not published until 1978. The first novel to be published was The Erasers, in 1955. It resembles a detective novel, but contains within it a deeper structure based on the story of Oedipus. The detective is seeking the assassin in a murder that has not yet been perpetrated only to discover that it is his destiny to become that assassin.
His next and most acclaimed novel, Jealousy, is set on a banana plantation. Written in the first person, it tells the non-linear story of a husband's suspicion that his wife is having an affair. "Jalousie" can mean "window blind or shutter" and it is with the husband's eyes, through the jalousie, that we see the wife's lover.
His writing has been described as "realist" or "phenomenological" (in the Heideggerian sense) or "a theory of pure surface." Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace the psychology and interiority of the character. Instead one slowly pieces together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions. Ironically, this method resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured and the resulting novel resembles the literary equivalent of a cubist painting.
Robbe-Grillet has also written screenplays. He penned the screenplay for Alain Resnais' 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, a critical success considered to be one of the finest French films of the 1960s. It was followed by a number of films directed by Robbe-Grillet himself: Trans-Europe-Express (1966), L'homme qui ment (The Man who Lies) (1968), L'Eden et après (Eden and Afterwards) (1970), Glissements progressifs du plaisir (The Slow Slidings of Pleasure) (1974), Le jeu avec le feu (Playing with Fire) (1975), and La belle captive (The Beautiful Captive) (1986).
