In the fictional context of the nouveau roman, the problem of critical analysis is … compounded by the mediation of the object in language and its concomitant over-determination in the superimposed itineraries of narrative events, along with the necessity of demystifying the relation between subject and object, the signifier and the signified….

Robbe-Grillet's first two novels, Les Gommes (1953) and Le Voyeur (1955), presented to the reading public a surface ambiguous enough to provide grounds for the most sardonic condemnations and the most elaborate apologetics. [Roland] Barthes was quick to recognize that the nouveau roman represented not merely a novel aesthetic, but that it attempted to revolutionize the hermeneutics of traditional fiction through its fidelity to the ethos of the world-as-object, a "degree zero" of extratextual signification. (p. 558)

That Robbe-Grillet had anticipated the value of a phenomenal poétique, even before the publication of his first novel, is evident in an...