SOURCE: “Toward a New Novel: A Theory for Fiction,” in Narrative Consciousness: Structure and Perception in the Fiction of Kafka, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet, University of Texas Press, 1972, pp. 123-33.

In the following essay, Szanto discusses Robbe-Grillet's philosophical perspective and concept of the “new novel” as delineated in Towards a New Novel. Szanto notes that Robbe-Grillet's theoretical writings have “contributed to the rampant misunderstanding about his fiction.”

Alone among the novelists discussed here, Alain Robbe-Grillet has published a volume of purposely theoretical writing. Kafka's diaries and letters, certainly not meant for publication, deal with the events, the day-to-day trivialities of his personal life; any information about his art must be carefully culled from them, and then it usually appears as its own kind of parable. Beckett's essays on Joyce and on Proust and his three dialogues with Georges Duthuit, all written before his presently published novels, these ostensibly deal...