09 Robbe Grillet, Experimental Fiction & Myth

#Literature #Fantasy #FairyTale The publication of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers motivated the creation of the term the New Novel. On first reading, it is a detective story pushed to the condition of true fantasy. Its radical style, Robbe-Grillet claimed, has important epistemological consequences and, in that way, is both a fantastic development of Émile Zola’s idea of the experimental novel and the fulfillment of Roland Barthes’ prediction about the evolution of writing. On closer examination, the novel also reveals itself as a reworking of the materials of the Oedipus myth as the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss understood it and as a critical reexamination of Freudian ideas about psychological fantasy. Indeed, for a clever minority of readers or re-readers, there is a last fantastic trick that converts this apparently ambiguous detective novel into a stable work of aesthetic didacticism.