SOURCE: “Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Reflexive Novel as Process and Poetry,” in Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures, Vol. XXX, No. 4, Winter, 1976, pp. 343-57.

In the following essay, Stoltzfus examines the artistic, literary, and theoretical influences behind the creative process in Robbe-Grillet's fiction. “According to Robbe-Grillet,” writes Stoltzfus, “every fiction is the story of a gamesman in a quicksand world who is continuously reinventing himself.”

The inner need that structures Alain Robbe-Grillet's novels and films seems to stem from the same creative source: his epistemology and the ontological imagination that surrounds it. His art as well as his essays have the precise optics of the scientist mingling with the sensibility of the artist, thus forming a kind of binocular vision: one form of perception seemingly canceling out the other, and the two together giving a view of the world that is existentially absurd.

The realism of Robbe-Grillet's...