SOURCE: “Alain Robbe-Grillet and the Fantastic,” in State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film, edited by Nicholas Ruddick, Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 91-6.

In the following essay, Chadwick and Harger-Grinling examine elements of fantasy in Robbe-Grillet's fiction. According to the critics, “Robbe-Grillet takes his reader into a fantastic world whose closeness to everyday existence prompts the kind of anxiety that he feels characterizes life in the late twentieth century.”

The novels and films of Alain Robbe-Grillet were originally decried as too objective by those critics who had not studied this author in depth, or who took at surface value Robbe-Grillet's own pronouncements on his work. The two volumes of what may be his autobiography, Le Miroir qui revient (1984) and Angélique (1987), testify to the irony implicit in all the artist's creations. If these volumes are indeed autobiographical (Robbe-Grillet gives them the...